[Rd] UTC time zone on Windows

[Kirill Müller]

Hi


I'm having trouble running R CMD build and check with UTC time zone 
setting in Windows Server 2012. I can't seem to get rid of the following 
warning:

   unable to identify current timezone 'C':
please set environment variable 'TZ'

However, setting TZ to either "Europe/London" or "GMT Standard Time" 
didn't help.

It seems to me that the warning originates in registryTZ.c 
(https://github.com/wch/r-source/blob/776708efe6003e36f02587ad47b2eaaaa19e2f69/src/extra/tzone/registryTZ.c#L363). 
I have therefore looked at 
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation, to learn that 
TimeZoneKeyName is set to "UTC". This time zone is not defined in 
TZtable, but is present in this machine's 
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Time Zones. (Also, the 
text of the warning permits the possibility that only the first 
character of the time zone is used for the warning message -- in the 
code, a const wchar_t* is used for a %s placeholder.)

Below is a link to the log of such a failing run. The first 124 lines 
are registry dumps, output of R CMD * is near the end of the log at 
lines 212 and 224.

https://ci.appveyor.com/project/krlmlr/r-appveyor/build/1.0.36

This happens with R 3.1.1 and R-devel r66309.

Is there a workaround I have missed, short of updating TZtable? How can 
I help updating TZtable? Thanks!


Cheers

Kirill