V1.10.0 Timezone Configuration Issue

[keypunch]

I just install V1.10.0 after using V1.81. Router is a DIR-825-B.

The issue is I set the time zone to "UTC+00:00 England", but the time zone reported by Gargoyle V1.10.0 is BST and off by one hour to UTC time as can be seen in screen shot.

System hardware RTC is on UTC and always has been on UTC time. All my systems hardware clocks are on UTC and have been for years.

I suspect the cause of the off by one is due to Gargoyle displaying current time as BST is the reason for the off by one hour to UTC, but does not explain why Gargoyle is not setting time zone to UTC+00:00 per the Gargoyle configuration.

I did reboot the router after in case the setting was deferred in some manner, but did not make a difference. The screen shot is after the router with V1.10.0 was rebooted after the time zone and other configuration changes were made.

The firmware was loaded with option not to try to preserve the router configurations from V1.8.1. That means I entered all the configuration items again to V1.10.0 web interface that I had in V1.8.1. No carry over nor loading from a saved configuration file was done in loading the V1.10.0 firmware onto the Dir-825-B1 that had 1.8.1 for about last 2 years.

[Lantis]

That setting is called “UTC+00:00 England”. England observes GMT (UTC+0) for part of the year, and BST (UTC+1) for the remainder (daylight savings time).

The behaviour is expected.

If you live somewhere that observes UTC+0 all year, you should use the settings above it.
“UTC+00:00 Gambia, Liberia, Morocco”

This behaviour has not changed since 1.8.1

[keypunch]

Sadly the notices of my pending posting of this topic went to my SPAM folder. Due to long ongoing OS Kernel issues I could not see this occurrence until now. I have a possible long term solution to the OS Kernel problem and just copied over my mail client files.

With all due respect UTC is UTC on own and for long time associated with Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). To have UTC associated with a location in world generally not associated with UTC and not just UTC on its own does not make sense. As I recall the Time Zone data for Unix, Linux, et al had UTC stand on its own without any association with a place/country and has been so for years. Why would this change from past releases of Gargoyle and why would this deviate from the Time Zone file data. I have scripts on Linux that parse out the TZData file in order to do specific time calculations and UTC stands on its own as I recall.

Example:

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ls /usr/share/zoneinfo
Africa       Australia    Cuba         Etc          GMT+0        Iceland      Kwajalein    NZ           Poland       UCT          Zulu
America      Brazil       EET          Europe       GMT-0        Indian       Libya        NZ-CHAT      Portugal     US           posix
Antarctica   CET          EST          Factory      GMT0         Iran         MET          Navajo       ROC          UTC          posixrules
Arctic       CST6CDT      EST5EDT      GB           Greenwich    Israel       MST          PRC          ROK          Universal    right
Asia         Canada       Egypt        GB-Eire      HST          Jamaica      MST7MDT      PST8PDT      Singapore    W-SU         zone.tab
Atlantic     Chile        Eire         GMT          Hongkong     Japan        Mexico       Pacific      Turkey       WET          zone1970.tab 

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How do I change my timezone to UTC/GMT?

Asked over 6 years ago on Ubuntu forum

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(questions 138423 how-do-i-change-my-timezone-to-utc-gmt as cannot post a url via url tags for some reason the pbpBBS says "You can’t post image, email or url links. Please remove ...")

states:

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To switch to UTC, simply execute sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata, scroll to the bottom of the Continents list and select Etc or None of the above; in the second list, select UTC. If you prefer GMT instead of UTC, it's just above UTC in that list. :)

And

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sudo timedatectl set-timezone UTC

Will change your timezone to UTC system wide.

You can do timedatectl list-timezones to see all the available timezones.

[Lantis]

Gargoyle is a minimal Linux distribution and therefore is not able to include the complex and large binaries that you have mentioned under Ubuntu. The TZ data is controlled via the system initialisation under init.d. I don’t fully understand how it works so I can’t provide further details there.

As to how Gargoyle displays the time zones, this is done with the following user interaction in mind:
- user understands where they approximately are in relation to UTC and scrolls to this based on the “UTC+10” etc labels
- where there are several options at this time stop, the user then looks at the country or city listing to see if they have one
- where they don’t, they now have the information required to google “am I in the same Timezone as X”

I understand your point, and I appreciate you articulating it well. However, I see no need to change this behaviour at this time.

If you need more assistance in setting Gargoyle up for your particular Timezone, please post back and we will get you sorted.

[keypunch]

I full understand the minimal nature of code that needs to be in router like devices. My point for making the reference to the TZData was the how the UTC time zone is indicated and being stand alone. The option for UTC you suggested shows as:

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Current Date & Time: 2018-09-19 21:07 UTC-0 

UTC-0 is not UTC, the UTC-X or UTC+X is to indicate a time zone thjat may or may not have daylight savings time, and/or sunset areas withing may or may not have daylight savings time.

I would think even with a minimal code that a UTC only entry would amount to an line or entry that the time zone information. I would think an extra line/entry would not present an issue to the obvious and necessary need to keey code to minimum in order to follow an accepted standard of time reference. Not to mention the obvious user related context of.

John L. Males
Toronto, Ontario
Canada
19 September 2018 16:19 EST/17:19 EDT/21:19 UTC

P.S. My watch always stays on local standard time and has for many many years for specific personal reasons.

[Lantis]

If your complaint is simply semantics then (the difference between UTC+0 and UTC) then yes it may be something that can be fixed.
However the string having a defined and standardised format is relied upon in the code and therefore would require more than just a quick change.

Currently this wouldn’t be high on my priority list, but if you want to raise it as an issue at https://github.com/ericpaulbishop/gargoyle it will more likely be part of my priority list. Just a quick description and a link back to this thread would be fine.

This also gives other contributors the opportunity to pick it up themselves (which you are welcome to do so as well if you are capable)

Thanks