Timezone error (again)

[Colin Watson]

On Mon, Sep 27, 2021 at 05:04:11PM +0100, Peter Flynn wrote:
> Last year (Oct 2020) I mentioned an error in timezone identity. I
> discovered this in Mint 20
> (https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=328864&p=1874705),
> but as the timezone identification seems to be common to all
> Ubuntu-based distros, and nothing has been done to correct the error,
> maybe someone on ubuntu-users can shed some light.
> 
> Dublin is located in the wrong time zone. Selecting Dublin from the City
> drop-down in Date&Time highlights the Central European timezone instead
> of the London/Dublin/Lisbon timezone.
> 
> Last year I was told that the lead dev is in Dublin so it will be fixed
> quickly. Have they moved elsewhere? There was no need for the data to be
> changed in the first place — please can someone put it back where it
> belongs?

This appears to be tracked upstream as
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-control-center/-/issues/1341,
though it doesn't seem to have had much attention there.  I expect it
relates to upstream tzdata changes in 2017
(https://github.com/eggert/tz/commit/b266263699ab1b02d7d4b7307e5303181bea00c1)
in which the Europe/Dublin time zone definition was changed to agree
with the legal definition of Irish Standard Time: unlike most time
zones, it's defined such that standard time is observed in summer and a
*negative* offset is applied in winter.  This results in the same UTC
offsets, but it appears to confuse gnome-control-center.

While none of this is my decision these days, I think at this point
unilaterally reverting the upstream tzdata change in Ubuntu would be
more harmful than figuring out a fix for gnome-control-center.

-- 
Colin Watson (he/him)                              [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]