More strangenes in zdump: no LMT

[Dave Rolsky]

On Sat, 19 Jul 2003, Dave Rolsky wrote:

> The data for Africa/Abidjan contains this:
>
> Zone	Africa/Abidjan	-0:16:08 -	LMT	1912
> 			 0:00	-	GMT
>
> But zdump gives me this:
>
> Africa/Abidjan  Mon Jan  1 00:16:07 1912 UTC = Sun Dec 31 23:59:59 1911 GMT isdst=0 gmtoff=-968
> Africa/Abidjan  Mon Jan  1 00:16:08 1912 UTC = Mon Jan  1 00:16:08 1912 GMT isdst=0 gmtoff=0
> Africa/Abidjan  Mon Jan 18 03:14:07 2038 UTC = Mon Jan 18 03:14:07 2038 GMT isdst=0 gmtoff=0
> Africa/Abidjan  Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038 UTC = Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038 GMT isdst=0 gmtoff=0

This appears to happen with _many_ time zones.  zdump is telling me that
the short name for the zone is whatever happens to be the most recent
name, and ignoring historical names.  For example, with Pacific/Pago_Pago,
I get:

Pacific/Pago_Pago  Sun Jan  1 11:22:47 1911 UTC = Sat Dec 31 23:59:59 1910 SST isdst=0 gmtoff=-40968
Pacific/Pago_Pago  Sun Jan  1 11:22:48 1911 UTC = Sat Dec 31 23:52:48 1910 SST isdst=0 gmtoff=-41400
Pacific/Pago_Pago  Sun Jan  1 11:29:59 1950 UTC = Sat Dec 31 23:59:59 1949 SST isdst=0 gmtoff=-41400
Pacific/Pago_Pago  Sun Jan  1 11:30:00 1950 UTC = Sun Jan  1 00:30:00 1950 SST isdst=0 gmtoff=-39600

Just to increase the pain, note that it's completely ignoring the
April, 1967 and Nov 30, 1983 observance changes.  I assume it's doing
this because these _only_ changed the short name, not the offset.

In fact, from what I can tell, _any_ time there is an observance
change which _only_ changes the short name, the change itself is
ignored.  For example, the 'war time' and 'peace time' changes in the
US during WWII are entirely skipped.

Looking at the binary zoneinfo files, I do see the strings for these
short names, like "EWT" and "EPT" for America/New_York.

So the question is where is the bug being introduced?

- zic
- libc
- zdump

I'm guessing that it's one of the first two, since zdump is just spitting
out what libc gives it, and libc only knows what the zoneinfo files say.

Could this be happening in the writezone() function in zic.c, where the
comment says "Optimize"?

I'm not much of a C programmer, so following the zic code makes my brane
hurt quite a bit.  It looks like it _could_ be happening there. If so, I'd
consider this a bug, since it's losing information.


-dave

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