Time::Local::timelocal() is broken over GMT/BST change

[Crispin Flowerday]

Binary package hint: perl

The Time::Local::timelocal() function seems to be broken today after the GMT -> BST daylight saving time change in the UK, e.g:

$ date
Sun Mar 25 18:28:21 BST 2007
$ perl -MTime::Local -e 'print scalar localtime( timelocal( localtime() ) ) . "\n";'
Sun Mar 25 19:28:48 2007

Notice that going through timelocal() causes the hour to be offset by one hour, the above operation should be a no-op and print out the current local time (and indeed tomorrow it will work fine).

Another example:

use Time::Local;
@a = ( 0, 43, 5, 25, 2, 107 ); # 5:43am, 25th March 2007
$t = timelocal( @a ) ;
print scalar localtime( $t ), "\n"; # Prints 6:43am

@a = ( 0, 43, 5, 26, 2, 107 ); # 5:43am, 26th March 2007
$t = timelocal( @a ) ;
print scalar localtime( $t ), "\n"; # Prints 5:43am

This broken behaviour seems to be isolated to timezones that changed from GMT (e.g. Europe/London, Europe/Dublin, Europe/Isle_of_Man all show the problem, but Europe/Paris and Europe/Berlin don't).

I have reproduced this on both edgy and feisty. FWIW, Using Time::Local version 1.07 works, but 1.10 doesn't (I don't have 1.08 or 1.09 available to test).

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Sun Mar 25 18:26:31 2007
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 7.04
Uname: Linux moonraker 2.6.20-12-generic #2 SMP Wed Mar 21 20:55:46 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux

[Steve Peters (steve-fisharerojo)]

On Sun, Mar 25, 2007 at 05:43:34PM -0000, Crispin Flowerday wrote:
> Public bug reported:
>
> Binary package hint: perl
>
> The Time::Local::timelocal() function seems to be broken today after the
> GMT -> BST daylight saving time change in the UK, e.g:
>
> $ date
> Sun Mar 25 18:28:21 BST 2007
> $ perl -MTime::Local -e 'print scalar localtime( timelocal( localtime() ) ) . "\n";'
> Sun Mar 25 19:28:48 2007
>
> Notice that going through timelocal() causes the hour to be offset by
> one hour, the above operation should be a no-op and print out the
> current local time (and indeed tomorrow it will work fine).
>
> Another example:
>
> use Time::Local;
> @a = ( 0, 43, 5, 25, 2, 107 ); # 5:43am, 25th March 2007
> $t = timelocal( @a ) ;
> print scalar localtime( $t ), "\n"; # Prints 6:43am
>
> @a = ( 0, 43, 5, 26, 2, 107 ); # 5:43am, 26th March 2007
> $t = timelocal( @a ) ;
> print scalar localtime( $t ), "\n"; # Prints 5:43am
>
>
> This broken behaviour seems to be isolated to timezones that changed from GMT (e.g. Europe/London, Europe/Dublin, Europe/Isle_of_Man all show the problem, but Europe/Paris and Europe/Berlin don't).
>
> I have reproduced this on both edgy and feisty. FWIW, Using Time::Local
> version 1.07 works, but 1.10 doesn't (I don't have 1.08 or 1.09
> available to test).
>

The most recent version of Time::Local on CPAN is 1.17. Perhaps using that
will cause the problems to go away. It appears that the problem was fixed
by 1.13.

1.13 2006-08-09

- Switched to using Test::More for the tests.

- Fixed a bug that occurred around the DST change for Europe/London
  (and probably other time zones with a positive UTC offset). If
  given, the hour immediately after the change (2:00 AM for
  Europe/London), then the returned epoch was 3600 seconds too
  large. Reported by Roger Picton. See RT #11662.

Steve Peters
<email address hidden>

[Crispin Flowerday (crispin-flowerday-deactivatedaccount)]

This is still broken in Hardy (Time::Local version 1.11) however downloading version 1.17 from CPAN fixes the problem.

[Simon Morgan (sjmorgan)]

Time::Local 1.18 is in Ubuntu 8.10 and appears to resolve this issue as per your test cases.