[tbox-l] Bug in libxslt?

[Markus A. <al...@de...>]

Hi all,

here's a problem that an user has reported lately when he was working on 
a program using xslt. It seems to the a bug in the libxslt RPM of the 
AIX Toolbox for Linux, as it works with the libxslt installations on 
various Linux systems where I've tested this (different distributions 
and different levels).

To demonstrate the wrong behavior, the user has provided me with two 
small files (attached below), which when invoked as "xsltproc sample.xsl 
input.xml" should return the current date and time like this:

altmark@pdw7: xslt (10) $ xsltproc sample.xsl input.xml
DateTime: 2006-07-07T18:10:46+02:00, Date: 07/07/06, Time: 06:10:46

This works fine as long as the timezone (TZ) variable has a negative 
offset to UTC, like here in Germany where we have TZ=CET-1CEST, thus 
explicitly running

altmark@pdw7: xslt (11) $ env TZ="CET-1CEST" xsltproc sample.xsl input.xml
DateTime: 2006-07-07T18:11:00+02:00, Date: 07/07/06, Time: 06:11:00

is ok, too. But for e.g. Eastern Time in the US one gets:

altmark@pdw7: xslt (12) $ env TZ="EST5EDT" xsltproc sample.xsl input.xml
DateTime: , Date: , Time:

As said, the latter works on a Linux machine (RHEL4 in the following case):

altmark@hdcl028: xslt (9) $ env TZ="EST5EDT" xsltproc sample.xsl input.xml
DateTime: 2006-07-07T11:51:53-04:00, Date: 07/07/06, Time: 11:51:53

To reproduce the problem:

1. Create a directory "xslt" and save the two attached files in that 
directory.
2. Create a subdirectory "exslt" and another two subdiretories "date" 
and "str" underneath it.
3. From www.exslt.org, download date.zip [1] and str.zip [2] and extract 
them to the "date" and "str" directories respectively.
4. Go to the top level "xslt" directory and run the command listed 
above: "xsltproc sample.xsl input.xml" with different settings for the 
TZ environment variable.

The strange thing is that it even works on a Linux machine with an older 
version of libxslt (1.0.33-5) installed than on AIX.

Can anybody more familiar with xslt than me please shed some light on 
this? Thanks!

Regards,
Markus


[1] http://www.exslt.org/date/date.zip
[2] http://www.exslt.org/str/str.zip

-- 
Markus Alt
IBM Lab Boeblingen, Germany
al...@de...