Can't get canonical zone

[jablan]

Hi, I'm trying to get a canonical timezone, for example from Europe/Skopje. On my machine i have:

$ ls -l /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Skopje 
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Jan  1 06:22 /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Skopje -> Podgorica

but in irb I'm getting:

> TZInfo::Timezone.get("Europe/Skopje").canonical_zone
 => #<TZInfo::DataTimezone: Europe/Skopje> # expecting Podgorica here

The source is ok:

> TZInfo::DataSource.get
 => #<TZInfo::ZoneinfoDataSource: /usr/share/zoneinfo> 

Am I doing something wrong?

[philr]

The canonical_zone and canonical_identifier methods only return meaningful results when used with RubyDataSource (and the tzinfo-data gem):

TZInfo::DataSource.get
# => #<TZInfo::DataSources::RubyDataSource: tzdb v2018i, tzinfo-data v1.2018.9>
TZInfo::Timezone.get("Europe/Skopje").canonical_zone
# => #<TZInfo::DataTimezone: Europe/Belgrade>

If you install tzinfo-data (or add it to your Gemfile), then you should get the correct result (which is actually Europe/Belgrade).

ZoneinfoDataSource doesn't attempt to understand symlinked zoneinfo files. This is because distributions that include symlinks don't tend to follow the Link definitions in the Time Zone Database (note that, in your example, Europe/Skopje and Europe/Podgorica should really both be linked to Europe/Belgrade). Following symlinks would therefore yield inconsistent and incorrect results.

[jablan]

Thanks a lot Phil! I think it could be useful to mention this gotcha in the docs.

[philr]

It is mentioned in the documentation for the canonical_zone method (see https://www.rubydoc.info/gems/tzinfo/2.0.0/TZInfo%2FTimezone:canonical_zone). I'll take a look and see if this can be made clearer.