Re: daylight savings time
On Wed, 14 Mar 2007 20:52:09 +0100
Florian Kulzer wrote:
> > I'm living in the Turks & Caicos Islands (in the sunny Caribbean).
> >
> > Running Debian Testing which is kept up to date.
> >
> > "zdump -v America/Grand_Turk | grep 2007" gives me :
> >
> > 117:America/Grand_Turk Sun Apr 1 04:59:59 2007 UTC = Sat Mar 31
> > 23:59:59 2007 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000
> > 118:America/Grand_Turk Sun Apr 1 05:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Apr 1
> > 01:00:00 2007 EDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400
> > 119:America/Grand_Turk Sun Oct 28 03:59:59 2007 UTC = Sat Oct 27
> > 23:59:59 2007 EDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400
> > 120:America/Grand_Turk Sun Oct 28 04:00:00 2007 UTC = Sat Oct 27
> > 23:00:00 2007 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000
> >
> > all of which is patently untrue, in that the TCI Government in their
> > infinite wisdom have chosen to follow the absurd (for us) US
> > adjustments to the DST dates.
> >
> > Presumably this occurs because the Grand_Turk information
> > in /usr/share/zoneinfo has not been correctly updated. How can I go
> > about getting this right?
>
> I think the relevant utility is "zic", the zone information compiler.
> I have never had to do this myself, so I am not sure if it works like
> that, but I would hope that you can redirect the output of zdump to a
> file, edit it to have the correct dates for the change to/from DST and
> then run it through zic to get a corrected time zone file. You
> probably have to study the manpages a bit to find the necessary
> options for the command. If you have the new file, make sure you copy
> it to /etc/localtime so that it will become effective. (AFAIK, when
> you set up your timezone with tzconfig then the corresponding file
> from /usr/share/zoneinfo is also copied to /etc/localtime without
> further changes.)
Thanks for this.
Since the man page for zic seems to have been written
in 1997, and zic is not included in Debian, I'm a little reluctant to
go where I'm probably going to get lost. As suggested earlier I've
filed a bug report against tzdata and trust this will correct the
problem.
As a further issue, how does registration of locales work? The only
sensible choice I have for a locale is en_US.UTF-8. While this gets the
job done, should there not be a locale choice for each country on the
planet (and maybe several for some countries). I can choose
America/Grand_Turk for a time zone, but have no such choice for a
locale.
I'd be happy to contribute the necessary information for a TCI locale,
but how to go about getting it built-in.
Chris Dunn
Turks and Caicos Islands
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