Package: timezone Version: 7.8-1 It looks like something's wrong with the timezone files. I started poking around when I noticed that my time was daylight savings time. I could have sworn that it was set right yesterday (I remember setting a battery powered clock by my computer -- this clock is set at the right time today, but my computer is an hour ahead).
When I looked in /etc/localtime, it was a file -- not a soft link. I don't know if this is something I did, but it makes it difficult for me to determine precisely which time zone I had set (I deleted the file and moved in a soft link to EST5EDT -- which I presume is the proper zone file -- but this didn't fix the problem). Perhaps I need to reboot my system (or maybe log out or log back in) to have a new zone file take effect -- however, this was not obvious from browsing any of the manual pages that I've gone over today. Anyways, I started running zdump on the files in /usr/lib/zoneinfo, and noticed something odd -- when I was in the zoneinfo/US directory, all of the files in the US directory are GMT. Then, I popped back to the zoneinfo directory and did a zdump on all files using find -- this time they came out correct. Furthermore, there appears to be a complete duplicate set of zone files under /usr/lib/zoneinfo/right/ -- though I've not analyzed this very closely. Finally, on a hunch, I copied the EST file name to a different name (foo), zdump also reported this as a GMT file. Since this investigation, I believe I've found my problem (my DOS clock is not set to GMT, so I'm using `clock -a` in /etc/init.d/boot -- but I'll report that as a separate bug). Here's the bugs, as I understand them: (0) zdump is in /usr/sbin -- though you don't need to be root to find it useful. (1) either zdump is broken or the zoneinfo files are broken -- they depend on the file name rather than file contents to determine their time zone. This makes /etc/localtime rather useless, because it conceals the file name. -- Raul