[php-maint] Bug#803305: php5: timezone "incorrectly" guessed from system

[Jaap Eldering]

Source: php5
Severity: normal

I ran into a somewhat special-case bug with the Debian patch that guesses the
timezone from the system default.

The system timezone is set to "Europe/London" in /etc/timezone, while php.ini
date.timezone is unset. In this case (after the recent change from DST to normal
time) the PHP function date_default_timezone_get() reports the timezone as UTC.

Although this is equivalent outside daylight saving time, it is not during DST,
which leads to wrong conversions between date/time strings and Unix timestamps.

I would suggest that the timezone be directly read from /etc/timezone before
using php_localtime_r(), which I assume has to infer the timezone from an
offset from UTC only.

Best regards,
Jaap

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 8.2
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 3.16.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)