Re: daylight savings time
On Thu, Mar 15, 2007 at 07:57:33 -0500, chris dunn wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Mar 2007 20:52:09 +0100
>
> Florian Kulzer wrote:
>
[ quoting Chris Dunn ]
> > > 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.
The maintainer will surely correct the problem as soon as possible. If
you cannot wait and want to try zic, it is part of the libc6 package, so
you should have it on your system at
/usr/sbin/zic
so it will only be in your $PATH if you are root. (Unless you changed
the default $PATH setup for normal users, of course.)
> 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.
Run
dpkg-reconfigure locales
and check if there is a choice that fits you better. (I did not see
anything on a quick glance, though.) There are fewer locales than there
are timezones. If your location has the same language, currency, paper
sizes, number and date formats, etc. as en_US, then you probably don't
need a separate locale. Only your timezone info needs to be updated.
(The Debian installer normally picks the right locale, timezone,
keyboard layout, etc. for you if after it asks you about your location.)
> 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
--
Regards,
Florian
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