Subject: bug#11748: acknowledged by developer ()

From: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2018 16:45:00 -0700

On 10/15/18 2:21 PM, Boruch Baum wrote:
> What is the basis for closing this bug report? The issue has not yet
> been fixed (6+ years and counting...).

The problem is not actually a bug, in that the behavior of 
"TZ=Asia/Moscow date" is deliberately not specified by POSIX or by the 
coreutils documentation, and coreutils 'date' can therefore do whatever 
it likes when misused in that way. That being said, it would be nicer if 
coreutils 'date' issued a usable diagnostic rather than simply treating 
the invocation as if it were "TZ=Asia0 date". Unfortunately, though, 
there's no standardized-by-POSIX or GNU-available way for application 
programs to do that, and although adding a glibc feature to provide a 
way to do it is on my list of things to do (see 
<https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=11620>), I have a long 
list.

To help record all this better, I reopened the bug report, made it 
'wishlist', merged it with Bug#9614 and Bug#14229, and invite anyone 
who's interested to add support for the request. The heavy lifting here 
is not in Coreutils proper, though; it's Glibc bug 11620, referenced above.