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

[raf]

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
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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

cheers,
raf