On Fri 22 Dec 2023 at 08:55:04 (-0500), Greg Wooledge wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 22, 2023 at 02:17:47PM +0100, to...@tuxteam.de wrote:
> > whereas /etc/timezone [1] is just the
> > global default for the (libc) applications to fall back to whenever they
> > don't have specified one.
> >
> > [1] Or whatever that thing may be called in systemd-land.
>
> Unless I'm gravely mistaken, /etc/localtime is the one that almost
> everything uses (libc and systemd), and /etc/timezone is a legacy
> relic, which nobody's *supposed* to be using, but which some old
> applications may still use, so we can't just remove it.
I think you're right, just as you wrote on the Glorious Twelfth
in 2019, only expressing that distinction seemed to make some
people uncomfortable.
One problem that has occurred on and off is how you report what the
"system timezone" is set to. Yesterday Max posted:
"That is why
readlink /etc/localtime
or
ls -l /etc/localtime
as a primary source."
But in the past, /etc/localtime wasn't a symlink, but a copy of
the appropriate zoneinfo file. So cat /etc/timezone was really
the only option, unless you wrote a script to look for where
/etc/localtime might have been copied from.
https://wiki.debian.org/TimeZoneChanges
still says:
"In Debian releases Etch and later, /etc/localtime is a copy of the
original data file. Check the contents of /etc/timezone to see the
name of the timezone. If the system is configured normally, you
should find that the zoneinfo file referenced by this name is
identical to /etc/localtime."
> dpkg-reconfigure tzdata updates both of them.
> timedatectl set-timezone only updates /etc/localtime.
which would imply that the concerns in:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2019/09/msg00035.html
are still relevant.
Cheers,
David.
