Bug 392011

Summary:	Incorrect UTC conversion of CST timestamps by the 'date' utility
Product:	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4	Reporter:	Marc Girod <marc.girod>
Component:	coreutils	Assignee:	Ondrej Vasik <ovasik>
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	QA Contact:
Severity:	low	Docs Contact:
Priority:	low
Version:	4.6
Target Milestone:	---
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Hardware:	i686
OS:	Linux
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Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
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Last Closed:	2007-11-20 12:32:59 UTC	Type:	---
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oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Marc Girod 2007-11-20 12:10:58 UTC

Description of problem:

~> date -u -d 'Nov 19 11:27 CST 2007'
Mon Nov 19 17:27:00 UTC 2007

Note: CST is China Standard Time.
The correct value was: Mon Nov 19 03:27:00 UTC 2007

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

~> rpm -q tzdata
tzdata-2007h-1.el4
~> rpm -q coreutils
coreutils-5.2.1-31.7

How reproducible:

Fully reproducible.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. date -u -d 'Nov 19 11:27 CST 2007'
2. 
3.
  
Actual results:

Mon Nov 19 17:27:00 UTC 2007

Expected results:

Mon Nov 19 03:27:00 UTC 2007

Additional info:

Found first on RHEL 3... with:
tzdata-2003c-1 and coreutils-4.5.3-26

Comment 1 Ondrej Vasik 2007-11-20 12:32:59 UTC

As is mentioned in sourcecodes of getdate.y (coreutils-{version}/lib/) is
impossible to make 3 letters long shortcuts of date without conflicts. For
example - EST is US Eastern standard time and Eastern standard time in Australia
- time zones of course differ. This one is conflict between China standard time
and US Central standard time. 
I will citate source code of coreutils:
"You cannot rely on getdate to handle arbitrary time zone
abbreviations; use numeric abbreviations like `-0500' instead."

So sorry, can't help, NOTABUG