Control: severity -1 wishlist On Thursday, October 9, 2025 1:27:00 PM Mountain Standard Time Guillem Jover wrote: > On Thu, 2025-10-09 at 11:19:21 -0700, Soren Stoutner wrote: > > On Thursday, October 9, 2025 9:56:57 AM Mountain Standard Time Guillem Jover > > > > wrote: > > > This package FTBFS when setting the TZ variable using the abbreviated > > > > > timezone and offset format. Such as when calling it with: > > Thank you for your detailed bug report. > > > > pyinstaller-hooks-contrib does indeed include a test expecting to find the > > timezone described in the Continent/City (zoneinfo) syntax. This is the > > generally recommended timezone format in Linux. > > Recommended by who?
By the Debian installer, among many other examples. In general, the lists of recommended timezones is managed for the community by the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database > > The package builds fine for me, on Salsa, and on the official buildds. > > That does not mean the package does not contain a broken test though. > > :) Although I can understand where you are coming from claiming this test is broken, that is based on the premise that obsolete timezone formats is something that should be supported by all upstream software. Although that may be the case, I am not aware of that being Debian’s official stance. > : > > Can you point me to any official documentation that says one of the goals of > > the Debian project is to enforce that all software works with the deprecated > > GMT+12 format? If so, I would be happy to take a look at this bug. > > Sorry, but deprecated by who? I see no such statement on neither of: > > https://sourceware.org/glibc/manual/2.42/html_node/TZ-Variable.html > https://sourceware.org/glibc/manual/2.42/html_node/Proleptic-TZ.html > https://manpages.debian.org/unstable/manpages-dev/tzset.3.en.html > https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/functions/tzset.html > > https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/basedefs/ V1_chap08.html#tag_ > 08 > > Instead, from the POSIX standard the main take away is that, for the > third form (that is the non-colon-prefixed, non-proleptic form), it is > stated: > > ``` > the value indicates either a geographical timezone or a special > timezone from an implementation-defined timezone database. > ``` > > Where to me that clearly reads that this format is non-portable, so I > don't see how the others would then be deprecated in any form. I do find these links to be at least partially persuasive. From them I would take that the older format definitely is not the recommended format. For example, from the second link: "Although the proleptic format is cumbersome and inaccurate for old timestamps, POSIX.1-2017 and earlier specified details only for the proleptic format, and you may need to use it on small systems that lack a time zone information database.” That sounds like the definition of deprecated to me. However, deprecated does not mean unused. It meas that it is not recommended that anything new uses it by default and that, at some point in the future, everyone expects the deprecated format to go away. But deprecated things are often still supported for a while. I will need to ponder over whether, in this case, it is important for pyinstaller-hooks- contrib to continue to support an older format. > > If there is no documentation saying this is a technical goal of the Debian > > project, then I will close this bug as wontfix. > > Hmm, we do not have an exhaustive list of all potentially broken things > a build system, or anything in a package can do. lintian or Debian Policy > encode either things that are easy to miss, or nice to automate, or where > different trade-offs could be made. Here we have a clear build failure > when setting a variable to a supported (non-deprecated) value, so I'm not > sure I understand the request, TBH. > > The build even fails with something like TZ=UTC0 or TZ=UTC+0 (which is > the strictly conforming way to specify a UTC timezone). (And this is > something that I could see «dpkg-buildpackage --sanitize-env» setting > and potentially that becoming a default in the future.) For now I am lowering this to wishlist, as supporting the old timezone formatting in all upstream programs does not appear to be an official Debian technical goal. If that ever does become a Debian technical goal then I will take a closer look. In the meantime I will ponder of this for a while and then eventually either close this as wontfix or exclude the test. -- Soren Stoutner [email protected]
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