Bug#837797: tzdata: America/Eastern reports Local Mean Time by default instead of EST
Package: tzdata
Version: 2016f-1
Severity: critical
Tags: newcomer
Justification: breaks unrelated software
Dear Maintainer,
* What led up to the situation?
Running unit tests in Python while set timezone using the string
'America/Eastern'.
The offset was reported as UTC-4.93333333333333333333 which resulted in
a discrepency of about 4 minutes
When running the same test on a server running Debian 8.5 with tzdata
2016f-0+deb8u1 the same test passed
* What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or ineffective)?
Changing timezone to 'EST' fixed the particular test and gave the
expected -5 offset for Standard time, but I think EST and America/Eastern
should be returning the same value
* What was the outcome of this action?
I was sad
* What outcome did you expect instead?
-5 offset instead of -4.9333...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_mean_time
Here's a gist with an example:
https://gist.github.com/gregflynn/2ac90ee0c39568f2e45f33ade476df51
-- System Information:
Debian Release: stretch/sid
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386
Kernel: Linux 4.6.4-saddle (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
Versions of packages tzdata depends on:
ii debconf [debconf-2.0] 1.5.59
tzdata recommends no packages.
tzdata suggests no packages.
-- debconf information:
tzdata/Zones/Antarctica:
tzdata/Zones/Europe:
tzdata/Zones/Australia:
* tzdata/Zones/America: New_York
tzdata/Zones/Atlantic:
* tzdata/Zones/Etc: UTC
tzdata/Zones/Pacific:
tzdata/Zones/Africa:
tzdata/Zones/Asia:
tzdata/Zones/Arctic:
tzdata/Zones/Indian:
* tzdata/Areas: America
tzdata/Zones/US:
tzdata/Zones/SystemV:
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