Australian timezone incorrectly labelled in date output

[Trix]

Binary package hint: firefox-3.5

When running the "date" command with my timezone set to "Australia/Canberra" (or any of the Australian Eastern seaboard sites), the timezone is displayed as "EST". This is likely to cause confusion with the American "EST" timezone.

The correct label for Australian Eastern Standard Time is AEST.

In addition, the label for Australian Eastern Daylight Time doesn't appear to exist. This should be AEDT. As an example, a nearby timezone, the New Zealand Daylight Time (NZDT) label is correctly displayed when daylight time is in effect.

The non-existence of the AEDT timezone causes a lot of trouble when you are working with hosts across states in the Australian Eastern timezones. One of these states, Queensland, does not have daylight time in summer. So when you are looking at the date on a host in Sydney that should be in AEDT, and a host in Brisbane that should be in AEST, both are reporting they are in "EST", but an hour apart.

This problem is not limited to the Ubuntu distribution; it also exists in RHEL, that I'm aware of.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sun Feb 21 13:43:12 2010
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release amd64 (20091027)
NonfreeKernelModules: fglrx
Package: firefox 3.5.7+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.9.10.1
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_AU.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-19.56-generic
SourcePackage: firefox-3.5
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-19-generic x86_64
XsessionErrors:
 (gnome-settings-daemon:3710): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_propagate_error: assertion `src != NULL' failed
 (gnome-settings-daemon:3710): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_propagate_error: assertion `src != NULL' failed
 (polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1:3813): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_once_init_leave: assertion `initialization_value != 0' failed
 (nautilus:3809): Eel-CRITICAL **: eel_preferences_get_boolean: assertion `preferences_is_initialized ()' failed
 (firefox:3897): GLib-WARNING **: g_set_prgname() called multiple times

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

Moving to tzdata as this is not a Firefox issue.

[Mitch Towner (kermiac)]

Upstream has a bug (http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=93810) that has been marked as "won't fix". There has also been a very in-depth discussion regarding this issue at http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.time.tz/2262.
Basically, there has been no consensus as to whether or not this should be changed.

[Trix (trixtah)]

Thanks for the references. I will note that while a few Australian government websites will still refer to timezones like "EDT" (Eastern Daylight Time) and "CDT" (Central Daylight Time), these are generally understood to be used within Australia only (such as weather forecasts, when repeating "Australia" constantly would be redundant): http://reg.bom.gov.au/climate/averages/tables/daysavtm.shtml

For more general purposes, the Australian govt mandates the AEST/AEDT (and ACST etc) labels. http://www.australia.gov.au/about-australia/our-country/time.

I might pursue these arguments upstream, although as a non-contributor, there is bound to be a limit to the weight of my remarks.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

This has been fixed upstream in tzdata 2014f; I've just synced the Debian packaging of that into Ubuntu. See:

  http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz-announce/2014-August/000023.html