When using Non-geographic timezones in system-config-date, the resulting time is always off by 2 times the number timezones away from GMT. For instance, selecting GMT-5 should give Eastern Standard Time but instead gives Pakistan Standard Time, which is UTC+5. system-config-date package version is 1.9.67 Steps to Reproduce: Set timezone according to geographic location Update clock using ntpdate Observe correct time is set Set timezone using GMT-5 for Eastern Standard Time. Update clock using ntpdate Observe time is off by +10 hours.
It seems that the non-geographic time zones are named counterintuitively. This is what I got when setting the time zone to "GMT-2" and "GMT+5" which right now correspond to Central European Summer Time (DST) and Eastern Standard Time, respectively: nils@gibraltar:~> date -R Mon, 02 Apr 2012 11:13:05 +0200 nils@gibraltar:~> date Mon Apr 2 11:13:09 GMT-2 2012 nils@gibraltar:~> date -R Mon, 02 Apr 2012 04:14:01 -0500 nils@gibraltar:~> date Mon Apr 2 04:14:02 GMT+5 2012 The names of the time zones are defined in tzdata, changing component accordingly.
Yes they are. It's silly, I don't know what rationale there is for this, but apparently POSIX mandates this. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 224442 ***