I've been trying to build R 3.3.1 inside of a Nix environment on a Ubuntu 16.04 machine. It builds, but then it fails a regression test related to time zones, and I hope that someone could help me debug the problem. The failing test is in tests/reg-tests-rc.R (https://github.com/wch/r-source/blob/c3fe9cd4/tests/reg-tests-1c.R#L1577-L1587): ## format.POSIXlt() of Jan.1 if 1941 or '42 is involved: tJan1 <- function(n1, n2) strptime(paste0(n1:n2,"/01/01"), "%Y/%m/%d", tz="CET") wDSTJan1 <- function(n1, n2) which("CEST" == sub(".* ", '', format(tJan1(n1,n2), usetz=TRUE))) (w8 <- wDSTJan1(1801, 2300)) (w9 <- wDSTJan1(1901, 2300)) stopifnot(identical(w8, 141:142),# exactly 1941:1942 had CEST on Jan.1 identical(w9, 41: 42)) ## for R-devel Jan.2016 to Mar.14 -- *AND* for R 3.2.4 -- the above gave ## integer(0) and c(41:42, 99:100, ..., 389:390) respectively The resulting output is:> (w8 <- wDSTJan1(1801, 2300))integer(0)> (w9 <- wDSTJan1(1901, 2300))integer(0)> stopifnot(identical(w8, 141:142),# exactly 1941:1942 had CEST on Jan.1+ identical(w9, 41: 42)) Error: identical(w8, 141:142) is not TRUE Execution halted In this build of R, I get the following:> strptime(paste0(1940:1945,"/01/01"), "%Y/%m/%d", tz="CET")[1] "1940-01-01 CET" "1941-01-01 CET" "1942-01-01 CET" "1943-01-01 CET" [5] "1944-01-01 CET" "1945-01-01 CET" However, when I run the same code in R 3.3.1 installed via the .deb packages on cran.r-project.org, I get a different result: years 1941 and 1942 have the CEST time zone. This is what the tests above were expecting.> strptime(paste0(1940:1945,"/01/01"), "%Y/%m/%d", tz="CET")[1] "1940-01-01 CET" "1941-01-01 CEST" "1942-01-01 CEST" "1943-01-01 CET" [5] "1944-01-01 CET" "1945-01-01 CET" I'm not sure where to start looking to fix this problem, and I'd appreciate any pointers. For reference, the test was introduced in: https://github.com/wch/r-source/commit/55cdf88dv And that commit's message says that it fixed a bug introduced by: https://github.com/wch/r-source/commit/2e36b365 -Winston