Friday, June 22, 2012

Armenia Time issue on Mac OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard

Introduction

As you know government of Armenia announced a decision on 1/2012 that Armenia will remain permanently on "Winter Timer". As a consequence time on Mac OS X 10.6.8 and many other operating systems like Windows, GNU Linux (Ubuntu) the time was shown incorrectly i.e. it was behind of the actual time.

My bug to Apple filed on 22-May-2012


Summary: System time is an hour ahead of the actual time.
Steps to Reproduce: Set the time to updated automatically with the time zone of Yerevan, Armenia

Expected Results: It should be like here http://www.worldtimeserver.com/current_time_in_AM.aspx

Actual Results: The system time is an hour ahead
 

Apple responses to my bug on 22-Jun-2012

Hi Levon,

This is a follow-up regarding Bug ID# 11507120.   

Please update your report directly at http://bugreport.apple.com for the fastest response.  Please do not email your updates.

Engineering has provided the following information:

We believe this issue has been resolved in OS X 10.7.4.  Please verify this issue with OS X Lion 10.7.4 and update this report with your results.  

Note that the configuration summary indicates the problem was reported against 10.6.8, in which case the one hour discrepancy would be expected on 10.6.8 since that release predates the Armenian government's recent  announcement (1/2012) that the country will remain permanently on "winter time". Thus in the summer months 10.6.8 systems in Armenia will always be 1 hour ahead of actual time.

This issue is resolved in recent releases of OS X that incorporate more recent changes in Time Zone Data. The latest update of OS X Lion contains a Time Zone Data update that observes the new Time Zone schedule in Armenia (i.e. permanent adoption of Winter Time with no further Daylight Savings Time changes ).

OS X 10.7.4
Posted Date:  May 9, 2012

Bug reports requiring your attention will appear under ‘My Originated Problems’.  Please review this bug report and provide the requested information via the Apple Bug Reporter at http://bugreport.apple.com.  Once your report has been updated, Engineering will be alerted of the new information.

Thank you for your assistance in helping us discover and isolate bugs within our products. 

Best Regards,

Developer Bug Reporting Team 
Apple Worldwide Developer Relations

Conclusion

I'm happy to inform that the issue is solved for Mac OS X Lion but still exists on running Snow Leopard hosts. I understand that the version 10.6.8 is prior to Armenia's government decision, but still there are lots of people using Snow Leopard on their Macs, and this issue need to be fixed for them, i.e. if Apple doesn't have any mechanism to fix this kind of situation for 10.6.8 system users, this will be really "pity". Anyway I and many other people will hope that this issue will be fixed in 10.6.9 update of Snow Leopard system if it ever happen.