Bug 1380738

Summary: retroactive changes in zone abbreviations
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Reporter: Karel Volný <kvolny>
Component: tzdataAssignee: Patsy Griffin <pfrankli>
Status: CLOSED UPSTREAM QA Contact: qe-baseos-daemons
Severity: unspecified Docs Contact:
Priority: unspecified    
Version: 7.4CC: codonell, vdanek
Target Milestone: rc   
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Last Closed: 2017-02-28 21:53:24 UTC Type: Bug
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Description Karel Volný 2016-09-30 12:45:27 UTC 
Description of problem:
Upstream makes retroactive changes in zone abbreviations, despite it was promised that the new scheme will be applied only to new zones and zone transfers.

Due to rebasing tzdata, this affects *existing* installations, but I believe this is the kind of change that should NOT be done in .z stream, such changes in behaviour should be done only between major RHEL versions.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
2016g (and maybe older)

How reproducible:
always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. TZ=Asia/Vladivostok date -d "2003-08-03 22:43:22 UTC"

Actual results:
Mon Aug  4 09:43:22 +11 2003

Expected results:
Mon Aug  4 09:43:22 VLAST 2003

Additional info:
In this particular example, the change is very unfortunate - as it was already pointed on the upstream mailinglist (where the new system received significant backlash but was forced by "who codes decides" anyways), Russia uses numbered zones, so ordinary user (not following upstream development) has about zero chance to understand that "+11" does NOT mean "Moscow + 11" in this case.