Katie Battles the irssi Robots

I love summertime. I like having daylight at 4pm, and even as late 8pm in the height of summer. It's lovely being able to sit out in the garden on a warm evening to watch the sun going down.

Battling irssi to display the correct time when the clocks go forward, however, is not.

I have successfully permanently set my timezone as being Europe/London using tzselect inside my shell and I always thought irssi just inherited the time from the shell. It would make sense, wouldn't it? But no.

So, I had a quick search of the FAQs on irssi.org and discovered the command I was looking for:

/script exec $ENV{'TZ'}='BST';

I pasted it into irssi, and hit return. The clock remained resolutely at 02:45. I thought okay, fair enough, maybe it doesn't know what British Summertime is. I changed the command:

/script exec $ENV{'TZ'}='UTC+1';

The clock changed! Hurrah! Oh, but wait. It should read 03:45; instead it has changed to 01:45.

irssi has either developed superpowers and can now bend the space-time continuum, or it doesn't know which direction to go in when you append a + or a - to a timezone. I'm afraid that I'm rather sceptical about the whole superpower thing, though, so I'm going to assume it just has a very hilariously wonky error.

Sigh.