Impact of new U.S. Daylight Saving Time rules on NSJava

On March 11 the new U.S. Daylight Saving Time (DST) rules take effect for Canada and most of the United States (not Arizona, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, or American Samoa). Mexico is not participating.

Java does not use the operating system DST rules; it has its own. Prior to version 1.4 these rules were hard coded into the time framework classes. Beginning with version 1.4 these rules are carried in a Time Zone Database (TZDB) directory that is compatible with version 1.4.* and 1.5.*.

Not tending to the new DST rules can cause time methods to return out of sync values between the 2nd Sunday in March to the 1st Sunday in April and again between the last Sunday in October to the 1st Sunday in November.

If you are running version 1.3.*, and you don't want your time functions be out of sync, then you must upgrade. You might as well upgrade to the latest spr which contains the updated TZDB directory.

If you are not running the latest spr (AAR) of version 1.4.2 or the latest spr (AAQ) of version 1.5, you can upgrade just the TZDB directory using a java tool obtainable from http://www.hp.com/go/javaDSTtool

download TZupdater-1.0.zip. Unzip it and upload tzupdater.jar to the host.

On the host in OSS make sure that you have environment variable JREHOME set. You update the DST rules by

this may take a minute or longer. When complete you can verify the new DST rules by

You can of course upgrade to the latest spr - circumstances permitting.