Request to use the Continent/City (zoneinfo) syntax for reprotests
I maintain pyinstaller-hooks-contrib, which includes a test (run during build
and in autopkgtests) that parses the system timezone. This test currently
fails Salsa CI reprotest and other reproducibility tests because they modify
the timezone in the build environment using syntax like GMT+12 instead of the
Continent/City (zoneinfo) syntax.
zoneinfo._common.ZoneInfoNotFoundError: 'tzlocal() does not support non- zoneinfo timezones like GMT+12. \nPlease use a timezone in the form of Continent/City’
https://salsa.debian.org/python-team/packages/pyinstaller-hooks-contrib/-/ jobs/8382666#L6097
I can see the wisdom in having reproducibility tests check to make sure that packages build correctly in different timezones. My question is: do we gain anything by using the GMT+12 syntax, or could we achieve the same results by varying the timezone using the Continent/City format?
This was discussed on debian-devel in the thread beginning at:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2025/10/msg00006.html
Etc/GMT+12 and Etc/GMT-14 would provide the largest offset (note the difference in the numbers, with the positive offset going up to 12 and the negative offset going up to 14).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones#List
The special area of "Etc" is used for some administrative zones, particularly for "Etc/UTC" which represents Coordinated Universal Time. In order to conform with the POSIX style, those zone names beginning with "Etc/GMT" have their sign reversed from the standard ISO 8601 convention. In the "Etc" area, zones west of GMT have a positive sign and those east have a negative sign in their name (e.g "Etc/GMT-14" is 14 hours ahead of GMT).