Debian Refuses To Push Timezone Update For NZ DST

Jasper Bryant-Greene writes "Although a tzdata release that includes New Zealand's recent DST changes (2007f) has been out for some time, Debian are refusing to push the update from testing into the current stable distribution, codenamed Etch, on the basis that 'it's not a security bug.' This means that unless New Zealand sysadmins install the package manually, pull the package from testing, or alter the timezone to 'GMT-13' manually, all systems running Debian Etch in New Zealand currently have the incorrect time, as DST went into effect this morning. As one of the last comments in the bug report says, 'even Microsoft are not this silly.' The final comment (at this writing), from madcoder, says 'The package sits in volatile for months. Please take your troll elsewhere.'"

Apple are just as bad

[kiwioddBall]

They haven't rolled out a patch for OSX either. There are several folks on Apple in NZ who are just as disappointed.
Meanwhile, Microsoft rolled out a patch on Windows Update - Microsoft users on Automatic Updates rolled over without even knowing anything had changed.

Re:Debian keeps getting sillier every day.

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian has been on a long slide for a while now. Their main focus now appears to be legalese and rules, whether it's spending hundreds of man-hours arguing over a single clause in a license, or spending hundreds of man-hours pissing over a trivial change like this. Anything that deviates even slightly from their carefully written, extremely precise rules, they're not interested.

Debian probably wastes more man hours producing nothing at all than other smaller distributions spend in total. Utterly pointless.

With my FreeBSD hats...

[MavEtJu]

As the person who did the latest timzeone updates to RELENG_5, RELENG_6 and HEAD (but not to the security-only branches RELENG_5_5 and RELENG_6_2) I say: They're right.
As the person who maintains the misc/zoneinfo port I say: They're right.

Re:Either you don't get it or you're a troll.

[Gothmog of A]

I am not so sure it is the right thing. Cron jobs are supposed to run at a specified wall-clock time. If the wall-clock time is not correct any more cron jobs will get out-of-sync with business procedures.

It may not be a security risk but most servers' behaviour will probably change more without the patch than with it.

Re:Apple are just as bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds great to me... but you should see the mess which our company's Outlook/Exchange server turns into every year whenever DST starts or stops in Israel (Israel's DST "policy" is vaguely related to the Hebrew calendar and whoever is in political office at the time).

Re:This points to a wider problem...

[b0s0z0ku]

So give tax breaks to employers who change their working hours for the summer. Time is an important point of reference, and altering it is the height of stupidity and self-delusion.

-b.

Re:So there are no time based security attacks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian is considered the stable distribution . . .

I would buy that if Debian billed itself as "The Server OS" but it doesn't. Debian aims to be "The Universal Operating System". Check out the title of its website [debian.org] if you don't believe me. Despite what Debian developers aim to produce, their technical decisions such as this that will continue to drive new Linux users to more accomodating distros such as Ubuntu.

Re:Is it a security update?

[jabuzz]

So pray explain why they pushed a timezone update for the US changes earlier in the year? As another poster said the reputation of Debian is being ruined by the ineptitude and down right stupidity of the management.

Re:Either you don't get it or you're a troll.

[Russ Nelson]

First, it sounds like this is only a problem because installing 'volatile' is not the default. If it was, then all these machine would now be up to date.

Second, changing the time zone only changes the *presentation* of the time. It doesn't change the time itself. If your software doesn't understand that the presentation of the time is simply a user preference, then your software has a more serious problem.