Timezone for "Africa/Kigali" defaults to pre-1903 definition

Bug #1389042 reported by nicpottier
16
This bug affects 3 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
pytz
Opinion
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

This is a bit of an odd one, and I think I learned a bit about some crazy timezones in the past.

In pytz 2014.7, a request for the timezone for "Africa/Kigali" correctly returned CAT:

>>> import pytz
>>> pytz.__version__
'2014.7'
>>> pytz.timezone("Africa/Kigali")
<DstTzInfo 'Africa/Kigali' LMT+2:00:00 STD>

But in pytz 2014.9, instead we get LMT

>>> import pytz
>>> pytz.__version__
'2014.9'
>>> pytz.timezone("Africa/Kigali")
<DstTzInfo 'Africa/Kigali' LMT+2:10:00 STD>

This seems wrong, as LMT was only in use up to 1903 and it *feels* more correct to return a timezone for the present as the default case unless someone asks otherwise.

We noticed this when some unit tests broke and it took a bit of tracking down that pytz changed its behavior.

Is there a reason for this and is the current behavior the "correct" way? I suppose we could work around it in various ways if so, but thought I'd report this if not.

Related branches

Revision history for this message
Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote :

This has also broken the Launchpad test suite. I think it's a consequence of tzdata commit 7fb077a9ff67dab22b9a23f64f65f85d59cf593e, which added a new transition at INT_MIN.

Revision history for this message
Stuart Bishop (stub) wrote :
Changed in pytz:
status: New → Opinion
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