Eric Erhardt wrote:
I've hit a snag with the latest tzdata 2015f. (I'm not sure when this change started, but the problem doesn't occur with the tzfiles that are shipped with an Ubuntu 14.04 distribution.) The problem is that the 2015f version of the tzdata contains an initial "Transition Time" that is out of order. The beginning of the America/Chicago tzfile looks like the following: Transition Time
Transition Offset
01/01/1970 00:00:00
-05:50:36
11/18/1883 18:00:00
-06:00:00
That's not what I'm seeing. I assume you're talking about the 64-bit part of the file, since the 1883 time stamp does not fit in 32 bits. The first transition I see, at offset 1348 of the America/Chicago file, is for -576460752303423488 (0xf800000000000000), which is the BIG_BANG time (see zic.c). The second, at file offset 1356, is for -2717650800 (0xffffffff5e03f090), which is 1883-11-18 17:00:00 UTC. Neither of these transition times agree with the times you're showing.
the problem doesn't occur with the tzfiles that are shipped with an Ubuntu 14.04 distribution.)
For what it's worth, the America/Chicago file that I generate by typing 'make install' with the tz distribution is byte-for-byte identical to /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Chicago on my 64-bit Ubuntu 15.04 host. If I had to guess, my guess is that your software is mishandling the BIG_BANG time because the time stamp is so far in the past. Perhaps Ubuntu 14.04 didn't do the Big Bang?