Comment 14 for bug 354793

I agree that other scripts may probably also be hit by this type of error. Nevertheless, 'date' *does* return a non-zero return code if an error if found; *not* checking if a command ended in error is a much more serious programming error than this, ah, "invalid" date returned. With that said, if 'date' did not return a non-zero RC on this... then *this* is certainly a bug, no doubt.

The behaviour of 'date' is well-documented (or, at least, well, documented), and this type of 'invalid' return can happen. We can discuss upstream (in the same mailing list you quoted) -- this would be the best venue. I can see -- and, again, quoting from the email thread you provided -- that a case that 'date' should return the first available time in a date, instead or erroring out if 00:00:00 (or some other time/date/TZ combination) does not exist.

Just be aware that this will be a "short blanket" thing, since (now) the apt cron scripts will work, but somewhere out in the wild world someone will have a script that depends on the day beginning at 00:00:00... and this will now fail!