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  • British Columbia Daylight Saving Time

    From Walter Premier@3:633/10 to All on Tuesday, March 03, 2026 21:00:01
    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


    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.12
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From Russ Allbery@3:633/10 to All on Tuesday, March 03, 2026 22:00:01
    Walter Premier <walterpremier@gmail.com> 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 tz@iana.org mailing list.

    --
    Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.12
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From Russ Allbery@3:633/10 to All on Wednesday, March 04, 2026 00:20:02
    Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> 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 (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.12
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)
  • From gregor herrmann@3:633/10 to All on Saturday, March 07, 2026 02:00:01
    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
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    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.12
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)