Not being able to determine timezone causes opaque errors in indexing

[MatthewWilkes]

There has been a report of Debian (Lenny) and Ubuntu (9.04) installations failing due to KeyError in DateTime.DateTime.toZone

This is because if the python install can't pick up a timezone other than an empty string. DateTime fails at looking up the timezone in its data structures. This causes indexing of CreationDate to fail, which happens on front-page of new sites, meaning that users cannot add Plone sites.

A work-around is setting the TZ environment variable, but we could really do with a more helpful error message, so that users know what to look for.

[kleist]

I cannot decode this sentence above:

"This is because if the python install can't pick up a timezone other than DateTime fails at looking up the timezone in its data structures."

I guess that a word has been lost? Note the transition to italics...

[bibek]

 Lennart Regebro says, "there is no way to reliably determine the timezone on a machine. So it's done unreliably, and sometimes fails."

I've written about my experience with this problem and the fix suggested by MatthweWikles here:  http://bibek.posterous.com/solved-plone-installation-strange-error

Thanks, Bibek

[hannosch]

This sounds like we should have a check for a valid timezone and a warning message at startup time. Something like: "The timezone of this machine could not be determined automatically, please specify it using the TZ environment variable. This can be achieved using the 'environment-vars' option of the plone.recipe.zope2instance recipe."