Comment 10 for bug 2030684

PHP carries a patch (in debian) to allow the interpreter to use the symtem's tzdata. This issue triggered a (until now) concealed issue which leads to a null pointer deref.

While the latest tzdata upload fixes the issue in PHP, it should be nice to re-visit that PHP patch to ensure that it either falls back to the php internal tz data db or to make php fail gracefully when there are inconsistencies between the hardcoded assumptions (e.g., setting a default to UTC when no data is found) and the actual tzdata in the system (e.g., the UTC value set as default is not available in the system).

I am adding this bug to the server team backlog so we can re-visit the patch when time allows. Once the other components are fixed, we should remove the update-excuse tag from this bug.