time-admin doesn't have Brazil's official time zone

[Waldir Leoncio]

Binary package hint: gnome-system-tools

This is a feature request. Brazil's official time zone, Brasília time (GMT -3), is not on Ubuntu's Time Zone list. This is a very important time zone for us, because practically all national events are advertised as "X hours, Brasília time". The current workaround is to set it to America/Sao_Paulo, because the city of São Paulo follows the country's official time, but Ubuntu would feel a lot more comfortable to us brazilians if there was an America/Brasilia time zone to choose. Not to mention that, although São Paulo is Brazil's biggest city, Brasília is the actual capital, and because it is nowhere near São Paulo (they're a thousand km apart), it is not obvious that they share the same time zone.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Thu Oct 22 12:40:19 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/time-admin
Package: gnome-system-tools 2.28.1-0ubuntu1
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-14.48-generic
SourcePackage: gnome-system-tools
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-14-generic i686

[Milan Bouchet-Valat (nalimilan)]

Yeah, there's been the same problem with the Asia/Beijing time zone that does not exist, because it's Asia/Shanghai (see bug 228554). I still don't know whether this is a bug in timezone, which should provide symlinks or duplicate zones, or if we should hardcode (!) in the GUI some locations that are equivalent to others. I think we should report that to Debian, because nobody has answered in Ubuntu, which may indicate that we don't really work on it.

[Victor Vargas (kamus)]

I have checked this issue under Ubuntu Maverick and is working fine here (Brasília, Distrito Federal, Brasil GMT-3/GMT-2) so shall we mark this report as fixed?

[Milan Bouchet-Valat (nalimilan)]

Kamus: are you sure you checked in time-admin, and not in gnome-panel? I still don't see Brasilia in time-admin...

[Waldir Leoncio (wleoncio)]

I still see only "America/Sao_Paulo"... :-/

[Milan Bouchet-Valat (nalimilan)]

Why do you think it is not a tzdata bug? time-admin merely shows timezones as reported by /usr/share/zoneinfo/zone.tab, which is shipped by tzdata, so the real bug must be there.

[Benjamin Drung (bdrung)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better.

As of tzdata 2022g there are following timezones of Brazil:

America/Noronha
America/Belem
America/Santarem
America/Fortaleza
America/Recife
America/Araguaina
America/Maceio
America/Bahia
America/Sao_Paulo
America/Campo_Grande
America/Cuiaba
America/Porto_Velho
America/Boa_Vista
America/Manaus
America/Eirunepe
America/Rio_Branco

See https://data.iana.org/time-zones/tz-link.html for details about the naming. Quote from there: "Timezones are typically identified by continent or ocean and then by the name of the largest city within the region containing the clocks."

This kind of change must be done via the upstream project instead of only in Ubuntu. Please contact upstream via the <email address hidden> mailing list. Expect them to ask for evidence. Having Brasília time publicly used might convince them to change this timezone name.

I am marking this bug as "Won't Fix" (as in not deviating from the upstream naming) for the Ubuntu tzdata package. Upstream changes will trickle down to Ubuntu.