Tim: >> Things are being made a bit more awkward, this year, as the summertime >> changeover has been postponed from the usual time. So some unmodifiable >> gadgets will get this wrong. Steffen Kluge: > In theory, this shouldn't happen, as all gadgets are supposed to use the > same library routines (man localtime(3) and friends) to find out what > the local (wall clock) time is. The current tzdata package does cover > this year's exception for Australia, as you can verify by running "zdump > -v -c 2007 Australia/NSW" or similar, to show DST transitions. The behaving PC: $ /usr/sbin/zdump -v -c 2007 Australia/Adelaide |grep 2006 Australia/Adelaide Sat Apr 1 16:29:59 2006 UTC = Sun Apr 2 02:59:59 2006 CST isdst=1 gmtoff=37800 Australia/Adelaide Sat Apr 1 16:30:00 2006 UTC = Sun Apr 2 02:00:00 2006 CST isdst=0 gmtoff=34200 Australia/Adelaide Sat Oct 28 16:29:59 2006 UTC = Sun Oct 29 01:59:59 2006 CST isdst=0 gmtoff=34200 Australia/Adelaide Sat Oct 28 16:30:00 2006 UTC = Sun Oct 29 03:00:00 2006 CST isdst=1 gmtoff=37800 The non-behaving PC: $ /usr/sbin/zdump -v -c 2007 Australia/Adelaide |grep 2006 Australia/Adelaide Sat Apr 1 16:29:59 2006 UTC = Sun Apr 2 02:59:59 2006 CST isdst=1 gmtoff=37800 Australia/Adelaide Sat Apr 1 16:30:00 2006 UTC = Sun Apr 2 02:00:00 2006 CST isdst=0 gmtoff=34200 Australia/Adelaide Sat Oct 28 16:29:59 2006 UTC = Sun Oct 29 01:59:59 2006 CST isdst=0 gmtoff=34200 Australia/Adelaide Sat Oct 28 16:30:00 2006 UTC = Sun Oct 29 03:00:00 2006 CST isdst=1 gmtoff=37800 I can't see any difference betwen them. > There is one big HOWEVER on my RH9 FC4 boxes, which I believe is a > packaging bug. Not sure what you're alluding to with the "RH9 FC4" bit? FC4 installed over the top as an upgrade, or you've got combinations of different boxes. Mine were all clean installations, and I've tried forcing a re-installation of the tzdata RPM file on the miscreant box (it installed, no noticeable change in behaviour, though). > All library routines dealing with local time look up your desired > timezone via the TZ environment variable or, when unset, use the > system wide default /etc/localtime. How do you read that TZ variable? I tried something like echo $TZ, on both PCs, but it just prints a null string. I do notice a difference between boxes for the localtime filedate: The well-behaved box: $ ll /etc/localtime -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 785 Nov 6 08:52 /etc/localtime The miscreant box: $ ll /etc/localtime -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 785 Jul 26 2005 /etc/localtime Looking at the install dates for the tzdata RPM file, they *were* both within a few days of each other. Although I just re-installed the tzdata file on the bad PC yesterday, it still has a much older date for that file than the good PC. > On sane systems /etc/localtime is a symlink to your chosen default zone > file (e.g. /usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/NSW in my case). Not in RH or > FC. Instead, the timezone setup routine of the installer simply copies > the chosen zone file to /etc/localtime. This is fine and dandy until the > zone file changes. Both my PCs: ll /usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/Adelaide -rw-r--r-- 2 root root 785 Jan 9 20:16 /usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/Adelaide So *that* file, at least, seems to have been installed properly. > I believe that /etc/localtime should either be a symlink to the correct > zone file, or the post-install scripts of the tzdata package should take > care of copying the new zone file over /etc/localtime. And I've just manually replaced /etc/localtime with a copy of the Adelaide file from /usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/, and my PC is now serving time correctly (without the stripey suit with arrows on it). A very big THANK YOU to you! I don't know why that file wasn't updated, I don't recall having any problems while doing updates, things going along smoothly. It occurs to me that there are two way they could have done the timezone setting better than copying the file: (1) As you mentioned, linking to the right one, or (2) a configuration option that simply named the right zone to refer to. -- Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
