freemint-discuss

[Freemint-discuss] Timezone and timestamp

[Peter S. <p....@sc...>]

Myself and others have reported timezone issues especially with
the change to summertime.


Android has a bug that means files sent over samba have their
timestamps set to the sysdate. So I use touch -t to reset the
times based on the filename. I have hacked up a perl script to
do this.


I do the mp4 files individually:

touch -t 201712101030 /tmp/20171210_103049.mp4

but in Thing they are shown with a time of 1 hour ahead.
I am using BST (GMT +1)

In this example the file is shown as 11:30 when I have stamped it 10:30



In bash the file time is correct:

bash-4.3# ls -l /tmp/
total 10460
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root     10692187 Dec 10 10:30 20171210_103049.mp4


Peter

Re: [Freemint-discuss] Timezone and timestamp

[David G. <dga...@gm...>]

Hi Peter,

2018-03-26 15:32 GMT+02:00 Peter Slegg <p....@sc...>:
>
> Myself and others have reported timezone issues especially with
> the change to summertime.
>
>
> Android has a bug that means files sent over samba have their
> timestamps set to the sysdate. So I use touch -t to reset the
> times based on the filename. I have hacked up a perl script to
> do this.
>
>
> I do the mp4 files individually:
>
> touch -t 201712101030 /tmp/20171210_103049.mp4
>
> but in Thing they are shown with a time of 1 hour ahead.
> I am using BST (GMT +1)
>
> In this example the file is shown as 11:30 when I have stamped it 10:30
>
>
>
> In bash the file time is correct:
>
> bash-4.3# ls -l /tmp/
> total 10460
> -rw-r--r--    1 root     root     10692187 Dec 10 10:30 20171210_103049.mp4
>
>

Is your hardware clock set to the localtime or UTC (GMT)?
I guess is UTC but to be sure.

How do you run tzinit in mint.cnf? Which option do you use?

Re: [Freemint-discuss] Timezone and timestamp

[Peter S. <p....@sc...>]

On Fri, 27 Jul 2018 10:01:10 , David Gálvez wrote:
> Hi Peter,
>
> 2018-03-26 15:32 GMT+02:00 Peter Slegg <p....@sc...>:
> >
> > Myself and others have reported timezone issues especially with
> > the change to summertime.
> >
> >
> > Android has a bug that means files sent over samba have their
> > timestamps set to the sysdate. So I use touch -t to reset the
> > times based on the filename. I have hacked up a perl script to
> > do this.
> >
> >
> > I do the mp4 files individually:
> >
> > touch -t 201712101030 /tmp/20171210_103049.mp4
> >
> > but in Thing they are shown with a time of 1 hour ahead.
> > I am using BST (GMT +1)
> >
> > In this example the file is shown as 11:30 when I have stamped it 10:30
> >
> >
> >
> > In bash the file time is correct:
> >
> > bash-4.3# ls -l /tmp/
> > total 10460
> > -rw-r--r--    1 root     root     10692187 Dec 10 10:30 20171210_103049.mp4
> >
> >
>
> Is your hardware clock set to the localtime or UTC (GMT)?
> I guess is UTC but to be sure.
>
> How do you run tzinit in mint.cnf? Which option do you use?
>


In mint.cnf I have the original (very old) settings commented out and the
updated one that was suggested when I originally mentioned the issue
about 8-10 years ago.

# Timezone (mandatory)
#~setenv TZ GMT-0BST,3.5.0,10.5.0
setenv TZ GB
exec    u:\sbin\tzinit -l


Somewhere, in the labyrinth of the start-up, ntpdate is called to set the clock.


Peter

Re: [Freemint-discuss] Timezone and timestamp

[David G. <dga...@gm...>]

2018-07-28 13:01 GMT+02:00 Peter Slegg <p....@sc...>:
> On Fri, 27 Jul 2018 10:01:10 , David Gálvez wrote:
>> Hi Peter,
>>
>> 2018-03-26 15:32 GMT+02:00 Peter Slegg <p....@sc...>:
>> >
>> > Myself and others have reported timezone issues especially with
>> > the change to summertime.
>> >
>> >
>> > Android has a bug that means files sent over samba have their
>> > timestamps set to the sysdate. So I use touch -t to reset the
>> > times based on the filename. I have hacked up a perl script to
>> > do this.
>> >
>> >
>> > I do the mp4 files individually:
>> >
>> > touch -t 201712101030 /tmp/20171210_103049.mp4
>> >
>> > but in Thing they are shown with a time of 1 hour ahead.
>> > I am using BST (GMT +1)
>> >
>> > In this example the file is shown as 11:30 when I have stamped it 10:30
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > In bash the file time is correct:
>> >
>> > bash-4.3# ls -l /tmp/
>> > total 10460
>> > -rw-r--r--    1 root     root     10692187 Dec 10 10:30 20171210_103049.mp4
>> >
>> >
>>
>> Is your hardware clock set to the localtime or UTC (GMT)?
>> I guess is UTC but to be sure.
>>
>> How do you run tzinit in mint.cnf? Which option do you use?
>>
>
>
> In mint.cnf I have the original (very old) settings commented out and the
> updated one that was suggested when I originally mentioned the issue
> about 8-10 years ago.
>
> # Timezone (mandatory)
> #~setenv TZ GMT-0BST,3.5.0,10.5.0
> setenv TZ GB
> exec    u:\sbin\tzinit -l
>
>
> Somewhere, in the labyrinth of the start-up, ntpdate is called to set the clock.
>

I have read that ntpdate feeds your system with an UTC time, so you
need to change the option for tzinit from "-l" to "-u". This explains
why you wrote in an email from last year that the clock in your
taskbar is not right during DST, during the rest of the year is
correct only by chance.

Do you have the timezone data base installed?, see if you have the
file /etc/localtime in your system, if so you don't need to set the
system variable TZ in mint.cnf, but be aware that the file localtime
must be the correct one for you time zone. If not you can copy it from
/usr/share/zoneinfo to the /etc directory and rename it to
"localtime".

Re: [Freemint-discuss] Timezone and timestamp

[David G. <dga...@gm...>]

2018-07-29 11:23 GMT+02:00 David Gálvez <dga...@gm...>:
> Do you have the timezone data base installed?, see if you have the
> file /etc/localtime in your system, if so you don't need to set the
> system variable TZ in mint.cnf, but be aware that the file localtime
> must be the correct one for you time zone. If not you can copy it from
> /usr/share/zoneinfo to the /etc directory and rename it to
> "localtime".

Sorry, possibly this is not the way to install your localtime file, my
memory failed me again. The "zic" command should be used instead, read
this:
https://github.com/freemint/mintlib/blob/master/tz/README.1st

Re: [Freemint-discuss] Timezone and timestamp

[Thorsten O. <ad...@th...>]

On Montag, 26. März 2018 15:32:28 CEST Peter Slegg wrote:
> but in Thing they are shown with a time of 1 hour ahead.

I think this is because Thing is compiled by Pure-C, which does not have a 
complete timezone database. Sometimes setting the TZ environment variable 
helps, but not always, and you have to remember to change that accordingly 
when switching to/from summertime.

Re: [Freemint-discuss] Timezone and timestamp

[Peter S. <p....@sc...>]

On Fri, 27 Jul 2018 19:41:24 , Thorsten Otto <ad...@th...> wrote:
> On Montag, 26. März 2018 15:32:28 CEST Peter Slegg wrote:
> > but in Thing they are shown with a time of 1 hour ahead.
>
> I think this is because Thing is compiled by Pure-C, which does not have a
>
> complete timezone database. Sometimes setting the TZ environment variable
>
> helps, but not always, and you have to remember to change that accordingly
>
> when switching to/from summertime.
>
>

I haven't been changing the TZ for summer, I had assumed Mint took care of the
time change.

rsync doesn't recognise the time changes either. It always copies files because
it thinks there is a 1hr difference in the filestamp.

If I rsync a folder in March (GMT) and then rsync it is June (BST) it will copy
the file again but the file hasn't changed.

It gets confusing because you never know which is a the real date-time.


Peter

Re: [Freemint-discuss] Timezone and timestamp

[Thorsten O. <ad...@th...>]

On Sonntag, 29. Juli 2018 14:34:09 CEST Peter Slegg wrote:
> I had assumed Mint took care of the
> time change.

Mint does not use the TZ environment variable, nor does mintlib. It only uses 
information from the timezone database. But Thing does not use mintlib, and 
the simple implementaton in Pure-C's libraries only uses a single timezone 
offset, which is can be initialized using the TZ variable. But remember that 
this is an ancient way of such handling. The TZ environment variable is only 
valid for the current local time, it does not work for arbitrary file system 
dates.

>rsync doesn't recognise the time changes either. It always copies files 
>because it thinks there is a 1hr difference in the filestamp.

That seems to be another issue then. rsync should use mintlib.