Package: faketime Version: 0.9.6-7+b1 1. faketime does not properly validate the supplied advanced timestamp format: $ faketime -f '2018-06-26 09:00:03+02:00' date -R Tue, 26 Jun 2018 09:00:03 +0100 $ date -R -d '2018-06-26 09:00:03+02:00' Tue, 26 Jun 2018 08:00:03 +0100 $
2. There is no way to specify a time which does not depend on the timezone in force. This is quite awkward, because there are some times which, in some timezones, cannot be represented in the offered `advanced timestamp format'. $ TZ=Europe/London date -d @$(( 1540683000 + 3600 * 0 )) -R Sun, 28 Oct 2018 00:30:00 +0100 $ TZ=Europe/London date -d @$(( 1540683000 + 3600 * 1 )) -R Sun, 28 Oct 2018 01:30:00 +0100 $ TZ=Europe/London date -d @$(( 1540683000 + 3600 * 2 )) -R Sun, 28 Oct 2018 01:30:00 +0000 $ TZ=Europe/London date -d @$(( 1540683000 + 3600 * 3 )) -R Sun, 28 Oct 2018 02:30:00 +0000 $ TZ=Europe/London faketime -f '2018-10-28 01:30:00' date -R Sun, 28 Oct 2018 01:30:00 +0000 $ The problem is that "2018-10-28 01:30:00 London time" occurs twice, at both of Sun, 28 Oct 2018 01:30:00 +0100 = Sun, 28 Oct 2018 00:30:00 +0000 and Sun, 28 Oct 2018 01:30:00 +0000 faketime makes it impossible to specify the former. This can be worked around by saving and restoring TZ: env TZ=UTC faketime -f <something> env TZ="$TZ" <actual command...> I suggest that these bugs be fixed by interpreting a numeric timezone offset in RFC3339 format, as shown above. This should be done for both the absolute frozen time, and the start-at timestamp. Thanks, Ian. -- System Information: Debian Release: 9.5 APT prefers stable-debug APT policy: (500, 'stable-debug'), (500, 'stable') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: i386 Kernel: Linux 4.16.0-0.bpo.2-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=C.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=C.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: sysvinit (via /sbin/init) Versions of packages faketime depends on: ii libc6 2.24-11+deb9u3 ii libfaketime 0.9.6-7+b1 faketime recommends no packages. faketime suggests no packages. -- no debconf information