Comment 5 for bug 772024

Is there any way we could see about having this package patched by an Ubuntu maintainer?

Based on reading over the open bugs associated with tzdata on Debian's bug tracker, this report and several other reports for the same undesirable behavior have languished from anywhere from 6 months to several years without a single response from the maintainer(s).

I don't know if that indicates a lack of concern about the issue or that the package itself isn't being actively maintained beyond database updates but in either case it seems to me that a user shouldn't have to constantly reset /etc/timezone in order to prevent it from being updated to a technically correct although undesirable value.