I'm just bitten by this today: I was trying to get the time zone offset in Python to print the local time for an app.

Doing

    date +%z

in console gives me correct offset

    +0800

of China (we do not have DST anymore) while doing

    import time
    time.strftime('%z', time.localtime())

gives me

   +0706

WTF??!!! I can understand Python might not be able to get the correct timezone info from the system, but giving this kind of obviously incorrect offset is just dumb. Still searching for a solution other than manually configure Python code. If anyone knows why, I would be really glad for your help. Thanks in advance!