Comment 15 for bug 1734967

Nish,

Yes the Ubuntu php build is configure with tzdata as follow :

debian/rules: --with-system-tzdata

and tzdata is a Depends: for a quit some derived binary package of php.

(The above is observation from bionic php7.1 source pkg)

# debian/php-common.README.Debian
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Timezone data from system timezone database
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  Debian PHP has been patched to use the system wide timezone database
  from the tzdata package, making sure any updates there are
  automatically used by PHP as well.

  Note that this requires that the PHP process has access to
  /etc/localtime and /usr/share/zoneinfo. For any regular installation
  this should be the case, but in specific secured environments when
  reading the timezone database is impossible PHP will give a
  "Timezone database is corrupt - this should *never* happen!" error.
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- Eric