[NCLUG] Daylight Saving Time, and free unices

[Brett Johnson]

On Sun, 2007-03-04 at 16:09 -0700, Bob Proulx wrote:
> Anyone else who maintains their system with current security and
> other critical patches will already have gotten the updated timezone
> files long ago.  This is really a non-issue.  I personally don't find
> it worth discussing.

In most cases, updated tzdata packages are available through normal
distro channels, and that solves most problems.  Unfortunately, there
are some applications and libraries which have seen fit to use their own
timezone data, instead of relying on the system-wide tzdata (which has
long since been updated for every modern distro, as Bob points out).

libical is one such package, and it's one of the bazillion or two
dependencies that the evolution email/calendar client has, and is used
to calculate timezone info for appointments generated by evolution.
There is currently not a fixed libical package in any distro I'm aware
of, but a fix did just recently go into the upstream sources (so it
should eventually show up).  I expect more of these kinds of omissions
to show up over the next couple years.

More info about the libical situation at:
http://www.mail-archive.com/evolution-list@gnome.org/msg05457.html
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=301363

-- 
Brett Johnson <brett at hp.com>