Port: astro/sunclock: Malaysia is in the wrong time zone

[Erich Dollansky]

Hi,

On Sun, 21 Mar 2021 17:03:30 +1100
raf <freebsd at raf.org> wrote:

> On Sun, Mar 21, 2021 at 11:31:34AM +0800, Erich Dollansky
> <freebsd.ed.lists at sumeritec.com> wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I just noticed that Malaysia is in the same time zone as Jawa
> > (Indonesia) and Thailand.  Wikipedia says for Malaysia UTC+8 and for
> > Jawa and Thailand UTC + 7. 
> > 
> > Is there no maintainer for this port as this list is listed as
> > maintainer.
> > 
> > Erich  
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I don't know anything about the sunclock port on
> FreeBSD, but I have been using it on Linux and macOS
> for decades, so I thought I pipe up.
> 
> Part of Malaysia (the part containing Kuala Lumpur) is
> directly South of Thailand, so it wouldn't be
> surprising if that part had the same timezone as

Malaysia is in the wrong time zone just as Singapore.

> Thailand. Perhaps the other part (around Brunei) has a
> different time zone, and Wikipedia is referring to that
> part? If so, maybe Wikipedia is incomplete?
> 
Wikipedia matches my experience.

> I must admit, I don't know where to see timezone
> information in sunclock. I can click on places, and it
> shows the solar time, which makes sense, and the solar
> time between the two parts of Malaysia are about an
> hour apart.
> 
> Ah, it's in the Sunclockrc file. But it only seems to
> store timezones for cities, not countries, and I think
> the only Malaysian city it has is Kuala Lumpur.

Yes, and the information given for Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta
are correct.

> 
> It contains these lines (for part of Malaysia and
> Thailand):
> 
>   addcity 2|KualaLumpur|3.133|101.700|PST-8
>   addcity 2|Bangkok|13.833|100.483|TST-7
> 
> You'd think that they'd have their own timezone
> abbreviations, and not have to borrow abbreviations
> from other countries so many timezones away. I don't
> even know what TST is supposed to mean.

The time zone abbreviations are also unknown to me.
> 
> I wonder if it will accept "Asia/Kuala_Lumpur" instead
> of "PST-8".
> 
> But when I click on Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur, these
> timezones in the Sunclockrc file don't seem to matter.
> It still shows the solar time (they are about 5 minutes
> apart).
> 
> I can't see that there's anything actually wrong with
> the way it's behaving.
> 
> How are you seeing these timezones in sunclock for
> different countries?

I display the map of the globe. Each time zone gets a colour. The
colours repeat with distance but direct neighbours have always
different colours.
> 
> The manpage says that the timezone needs to be the name
> of a file under /usr/share/zoneinfo (or whatever
> directory is used on your system). So it should accept
> "Asia/Kuala_Lumpur" instead of "PST-8".
> 
> Can you see if that works? If so, I'd be willing to do
> an audit and update all of the timezones in Sunclockrc
> to use the modern, geographic names for timezones. It
> would take a while, though.
> 
We first would have to get an idea of where to look. When showing the
map, Malaysia should share the colour with China. But it shares its
colour with Thailand an the western part of Indonesia.

Erich


> cheers,
> raf
> 
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