ok, conclusion of some discussion with formorer, my debian guy.
if /etc/locatime is a symlink, one can get the olson time from the link data.
else there might be /etc/timezone, which contains the string. (this isn't there on suse for exampe)
so there is no uniq way to access the timezone programaticaly at runtime.
making it a installtime shellscript guessable option seems to be the best solution to that problem.
so for the debian packages the postinst scripts can do the job..
easy install could do it too, but it sounds much more complicated, as it should bomb out any known solution.
readlink /etc/localtime | sed 's%^/usr/share/zoneinfo/%%'
i think easy install should create something like /usr/local/citadel/timezone with the string,
so setup can load that.
