Bug 469828

Summary:	several small issues regarding GMT timezone selection in anaconda
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Till Maas <opensource>
Component:	tzdata	Assignee:	Petr Machata <pmachata>
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	QA Contact:	Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	rawhide	CC:	anaconda-maint-list, mnewsome, pmachata
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Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
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Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
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Last Closed:	2008-11-04 19:01:51 UTC	Type:	---
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oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Embargoed:

Description Till Maas 2008-11-04 10:21:23 UTC

Description of problem:

Here are some issues issues regarding the GMT timezone selection:

1) The Etc/GMT* timezones should probably renamed to Etc/UTC* for consistency (e.g. there is Etc/UTC and the checkbox for the hardware clock also uses UTC instead of GMT)

2) Maybe there should be also a Etc/UTC+13 timezone, because this is the timezone in New Zealand during Daylight savings time (see bug #6175)

3) The Etc/ timezones are not sorted numerically, e.g. GMT+10 follows GMT+1 instead of GMT+9

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
11.4.1.50 from Snap3 i386 DVD

Comment 1 Chris Lumens 2008-11-04 14:48:41 UTC

The last is anaconda-specific, though the timezones are really text strings where a few of them just happen to have numbers at the end, so sorting them numerically isn't all that straightforward.  The other problems are timezone data specific.

Comment 2 Petr Machata 2008-11-04 18:58:17 UTC

1) We can't just rename zone, if anything we would add Etc/UTC* and provide Etc/GMT* zones as backlinks.  However there's no reason to do that either, just use POSIX TZ notation (e.g. TZ="UTC-4") to get the right zone:
$ for i in UTC-4 Etc/GMT-4; do env TZ=$i date; done
Tue Nov  4 22:43:08 UTC 2008
Tue Nov  4 22:43:08 GMT-4 2008

2) Etc/GMT+13 is not necessary, New Zealand (and its neighbourhood) lies in Etc/GMT-13, which is already present.  If you think it should in fact be Etc/GMT+13 then you are right, but for POSIX compatibility reasons (see the UTC notation above), zoneinfo database has the sign switched.  So:
$ for i in Pacific/Auckland Etc/GMT-13; do env TZ=$i date; done
Wed Nov  5 07:50:15 NZDT 2008
Wed Nov  5 07:50:15 GMT-13 2008

I'd mark this NOTABUG as far as tzdata is concerned.

Comment 3 Petr Machata 2008-11-04 19:01:51 UTC

Oh, I see it's assigned to me, so I'll simply NOTABUG it myself.