Converting a Go Time from UnixDate to RFC3339 Fails to Preserve TimeZone - datetime

Question

I am converting a UnixDate formatted time string to an RFC3339 formatted time using Go's time package. This seems to be easy and works well on my local machine, but when run on a remote host, the timezone info seems to get lost.
The input time is Eastern Australian Standard Time (EST) and seems to be interpreted as UTC by time.Parse().
Code snippet available here:
package main
import "fmt"
import "time"
func main() {
t,_ := time.Parse(time.UnixDate,"Mon Jan 14 21:50:45 EST 2013")
fmt.Println(t.Format(time.RFC3339)) // prints time as Z
t2,_:=time.Parse(time.RFC3339,t.Format(time.RFC3339))
fmt.Println(t2.Format(time.UnixDate)) // prints time as UTC
}
Do I need to specifically set locales or anything?

Answer 1

Timezone parsing in Go doesn't always work as expected. But that is a great deal due to the fact that timezone abbreviation names are ambiguous. For example, does EST in your scenario mean Eastern Australian Standard Time (GMT+11) or Eastern Standard Time (GMT-5)?
If your local time is "Eastern Australian Standard Time", Go will assume you mean local time. That is why it worked on your local computer. But since the server is not using that as local time, there is no reason to assume you mean Sydney time. Instead, Go chooses neither of the EST timezones and creates a fake time.Location with the name "EST" but the effect of UTC. The only way to tell it was originally meant to be EST would be to call t.Location().String().
The author of the time package wrote a bug report explaining how the timezone parsing works here.