Re: British Columbia Daylight Saving Time

[gregor herrmann]

On Tue, 03 Mar 2026 15:08:09 -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:


I should also have mentioned that, although the details haven't been
finalized yet, if your systems are set to the America/Los_Angeles time
zone, you will probably have to change them to the America/Vancouver time
zone.


Also the other way round: If you've set TZ to America/Vancouver, e.g. 
because you are living in Vancouver, WA, USA and enjoyed the nice 
naming coincidence, you should change the TZ value for your machines 
to something from the US pacific northwest.


(Real world case BCC'd :))


Cheers,
gregor

--
 .''`.  https://info.comodo.priv.at -- Debian Developer https://www.debian.org
 : :' : OpenPGP fingerprint D1E1 316E 93A7 60A8 104D  85FA BB3A 6801 8649 AA06
 `. `'  Member VIBE!AT & SPI Inc. -- Supporter Free Software Foundation Europe
   `-   


signature.asc
Description: Digital Signature

Re: British Columbia Daylight Saving Time

[Russ Allbery]

Russ Allbery  writes:

> In Debian, the time zone information is packaged in the tzdata package,
> and the maintainers have a whole workflow for updating it in all
> supported versions of Debian when there are legal changes to time zone
> rules or boundaries. All other software on the system should ideally
> then use the system tzdata for time zone information, although in some
> cases there are other packages that also have to be updated for
> different languages.

I should also have mentioned that, although the details haven't been
finalized yet, if your systems are set to the America/Los_Angeles time
zone, you will probably have to change them to the America/Vancouver time
zone.

Both time zones already exist since Vancouver has diverged from Los
Angeles in time keeping since 1970, and hopefully most folks in BC have
already been using America/Vancouver. But given how stable the US and
Canada time zones have been recently, outside of a few special cases,
sometimes people in "Pacific Time" will just blindly select
America/Los_Angeles, possibly through some intermediate tool that gives it
some older name like "Pacific" or "PST8PDT" or whatnot. Those folks won't
see the updated rules until they move their system to America/Vancouver.

You can do that with dpkg-reconfigure tzdata and then select Americas and
then Vancouver.

-- 
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org)  

Re: British Columbia Daylight Saving Time

[Russ Allbery]

Walter Premier  writes:

> I am a Debian user and I have just learned that BC will advance clocks
> on the 8th October 2026 and remain on DST forthwith.

> Will the Debian team factor in this change as it will only affect BC
> residents.

Hi Walter,

Yes, Debian routinely deals with changes like this. There are few things
that governments around the world seem to love more than tweaking their
time zone rules. :)

In Debian, the time zone information is packaged in the tzdata package,
and the maintainers have a whole workflow for updating it in all supported
versions of Debian when there are legal changes to time zone rules or
boundaries. All other software on the system should ideally then use the
system tzdata for time zone information, although in some cases there are
other packages that also have to be updated for different languages.

But rest assured that although this is not routine for British Columbia
residents, it is very routine from the perspective of all the world's time
zones, often on much shorter notice.

The upstream tz maintainers are working on this change right now; draft
patches have already been posted to the t...@iana.org mailing list.

-- 
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org)  

British Columbia Daylight Saving Time

[Walter Premier]

Hello,

I am a Debian user and I have just learned that BC will advance clocks on
the 8th October 2026 and remain on DST forthwith.

Will the Debian team factor in this change as it will only affect BC
residents.

Keep up the great work and thank you for such an excellent OS.

Yours truly,
Walter