Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 227577
RFE: time zone (CRON_TZ) support
Last modified: 2008-07-23 06:12:09 EDT
Description of problem: Vixie cron on NetBSD supports a variable called CRON_TZ, which a user can put into his crontab to cron what time zone the listed times are in. Among other things, this variable saves people who live in areas which use Daylight Savings Time from having to adjust the times in their crontabs twice per year. Since this is already present in another version of Vixie cron, I imagine it would be relatively easy to port it to the version that Fedora uses. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): vixie-cron-4.1-64.fc6
Some daylight saving is solved by cron see: man 8 cron, but you're right. It could be useful. I'll investigate about it.
Daylight saving has been implemented in your version of cron. If you have some problem with daylight saving, which could be reproduce, please feel free to reopen this bug.
The problem is not with DST per se. Rather, it's a problem for users who use a time zone different from the one the server uses. For example, I have a server in Tuscon, Arizona, USA. The state of Arizona doesn't use DST, i.e. it is always GMT-7 there. I'm in Amsterdam, which is GMT+2 from March to October and GMT+1 during the rest of the year. This means that anything I put into my crontab to run, say, at noon everyday in Tuscon is going to run at two different hours for me in Amsterdam, depending on the time of year. Conversely, it is impossible for me to schedule a process which will occur at the same time (for me) year round. Instead, I have to manually adjust the time in my crontab twice a year. This problem will occur for any combination of user and server where the difference between the user's and server's time zones does not remain constant year round. E.g., Europe doesn't switch to and from DST at the same time as the parts of North America which use DST, so it's not just a problem for people like me who have servers in Arizona. Implementing the CRON_TZ variable would entirely solve this problem, as then each user could tell cron what time zone should be used for interpreting his crontab. For a description of how CRON_TZ works in NetBSD, see here: http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?crontab+5+NetBSD-current
Thanks for explanation. Now is the patch working for me, I'll push it to development version. Hope that solution would be fine for you either.
Thanks for implementing this!