[kde-linux] clock off by an hour

[David Jarvie]

On Wed, October 28, 2009 3:42 pm, tsuraan wrote:
>> In the standard time zone database on Linux, all time zones are named in
>> the form continent/city. So there are no US/... time zones - only
>> America/... ones. America/Chicago happens to be the name which is used
>> in
>> the database for US central time, so that's the correct zone to choose
>> whether you live in Chicago or in Arkansas, Mississippi, etc.
>
> zoneinfo for Gentoo has these (non-conteninents):
>
> Brazil
> Canada
> Chile
> GB
> GB-Eire
> Greenwich
> Hongkong
> Iceland
> Indian
> Iran
> Israel
> Jamaica
> Japan
> Kwajalein
> Libya
> Mexico
> Mideast (maybe a continent in zoneinfo terms)
> Navajo
> PRC
> Poland
> Portugal
> Singapore
> Turkey
> Zulu
>
> However, zone.tab only lists things of the form continent/city, so
> maybe those are all non-standard, or at least not usable by programs
> that read the zone.tab file?
>
>> When /etc/localtime pointed to US/Central, it wouldn't point to any
>> valid
>> time zone data - it's strange that the system allowed the invalid link
>> to
>> US/Central to be set up in the first place. Why it settled on Cancun, I
>> don't know, but it's not surprising that it had some unwanted effects.
>
> Well, it is a valid zoneinfo file, but maybe not being listed in
> zone.tab is what's breaking things.  I've found that KDE tends to try
> to be clever and to not throw up error messages when it finds that a
> system is broken.  It would be really nice to have error messages
> rather than auto-reparation, even if as a compile-time option.

As Linux distributions go, having time zones which aren't in zone.tab is
non-standard - they normally just use the Olson database. The reason that
there is no error message is that the time zone software in KDE (of which
I'm one of the authors) doesn't cater for time zones which aren't in
zone.tab, if zone.tab exists - it just doesn't realise there's an error.
It obviously needs to be changed to allow for non-zone.tab zones.

Can you have a look at the zoneinfo files in the two different types of
location, to see whether either set is symlinks rather than files. It
could be that there is only one set of genuine files (probably the
continent/city ones) and that the others simply point to them. Knowing
whether this is the case would help in fixing the software.

It would be helpful if you could raise a bug report at http://bugs.kde.org
about this, and summarise the problem and include the information you
supplied about the Gentoo time zones. That would enable the problem to be
tracked better.

-- 
David Jarvie.
KDE developer.
KAlarm author & maintainer.
http://www.astrojar.org.uk/kalarm