Bug 189629

Summary:	Region is reset from Europe/Oslo to Arctic/Longyearbyen
Product:	[Applications] korganizer	Reporter:	MartinG <gronslet>
Component:	general	Assignee:	kdepim bugs <pim-bugs-null>
Status:	RESOLVED NOT A BUG
Severity:	normal	CC:	thiago
Priority:	NOR
Version First Reported In:	4.2.1
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	Fedora RPMs
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed/Implemented In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description MartinG 2009-04-14 17:48:17 UTC

Version:           4.2.1 (using KDE 4.2.1)
OS:                Linux
Installed from:    Fedora RPMs

In KDE systemsettings I have set Region to "Norway", and in korganizer, I for some reason have to set Time and date explicitly. It defaults to Arctic/Longyearbyen, which is a part of Norway, but only about 2000 people live there. The rest of us (about 4.8 million) use the Europe/Oslo timezone.

Now, when I restart korganizer, the timezone is automatically reset to Arctic/Longyearbyen.

How to reproduce:
Go to Settings, Configure KOrganizer, "Time and Date", set Europe/Oslo, save. Restart korganizer and see that it set back to Arctic/Longyearbyen.

Expected bahavior: The timezone stays at Europe/Oslo.

NOTE: These timezones are actually both UTC+1, but not everybody knows this, and that causes the confusion/annoyance.

Comment 1 Thiago Macieira 2009-04-14 18:06:52 UTC

This happens if your /etc/localtime is a copy of the /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Oslo timezone (as opposed to a symlink). So the daemon has to compare the file with other existing files to find out which one it is a copy of. It does so alphabetically, which explains why it finds Arctic/* first.

Solution:
# echo Europe/Oslo > /etc/timezone
(as root)

Comment 2 MartinG 2009-04-14 18:35:05 UTC

Thanks for the workaround:
# echo Europe/Oslo > /etc/timezone
and then logout/login seems to have solved the problem for me.

For the record, this was on Fedora 10, and I did not already have /etc/timezone. Maybe this bug is something packagers should care about, as it will affect most Norwegians (and possibly other folks living in countries with different/identical timezones).

Anyway, thanks for helping me out.

Comment 3 Thiago Macieira 2009-04-14 19:24:03 UTC

I live in Oslo too, that's why I knew.

In practice, there aren't many countries that have the same timezone spanning two major regions of the world. I can think of this happening in Egypt and Turkey too. 

(Europe/Istanbul matches Asia/Istanbul, but most people probably don't care)