Australian timezone oddity between two similarly configured FC4 boxes

[Steffen Kluge]

On Mon, 2006-03-27 at 02:38 +0930, Tim wrote:
> Things are being made a bit more awkward, this year, as the summertime
> changeover has been postponed from the usual time.  So some unmodifiable
> gadgets will get this wrong.

In theory, this shouldn't happen, as all gadgets are supposed to use the
same library routines (man localtime(3) and friends) to find out what
the local (wall clock) time is. The current tzdata package does cover
this year's exception for Australia, as you can verify by running "zdump
-v -c 2007 Australia/NSW" or similar, to show DST transitions.

There is one big HOWEVER on my RH9 FC4 boxes, which I believe is a
packaging bug. All library routines dealing with local time look up your
desired timezone via the TZ environment variable or, when unset, use the
system wide default /etc/localtime.

On sane systems /etc/localtime is a symlink to your chosen default zone
file (e.g. /usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/NSW in my case). Not in RH or
FC. Instead, the timezone setup routine of the installer simply copies
the chosen zone file to /etc/localtime. This is fine and dandy until the
zone file changes.

I believe that /etc/localtime should either be a symlink to the correct
zone file, or the post-install scripts of the tzdata package should take
care of copying the new zone file over /etc/localtime.

Cheers
Steffen.

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