Australian timezone oddity between two similarly configured FC4 boxes

Steffen Kluge kluge at fujitsu.com.au
Tue Mar 28 06:59:02 UTC 2006


On Tue, 2006-03-28 at 07:11 +0100, Paul Howarth wrote:
> I always get a /etc/localtime.rpmnew when there's a glibc update. Same
> again today on my last FC4 box.

This is all messed up. In the olden days (RH Linux), zone files were
part of glibc-common and /etc/localtime was part of glibc. I wonder what
the content of the original /etc/localtime was (as found in the package)
- it would have been pretty nonsensical for most parts of the world.

Things are slightly different in Fedora (as of FC4 at least). Zone files
are part of the new tzdata package, and /etc/localtime still comes with
glibc. However, no /etc/localtime.rpmnew file ever got created on my FC4
systems. Maybe your's stems from RH Linux days? When zone file updates
actually made an attempt to do the right thing? That said, I reckon the
right thing to do would be creating a .rpmsave file, and overwriting
localtime with the new zone definition.

> As far as rpm's
> concerned, /etc/localtime is just another config file and it treats it
> like any other changed config file, hence the .rpmnew version.

Well, it isn't a config file as such, it's not supposed to be edited.
It's a copy of one out of a selection of files.

In Solaris, /etc/TIMEZONE is a proper config file, and contains a string
like "TZ=Australia/NSW". The zone file pointed to lives
under /usr/share/lib.

In OpenBSD, /etc/localtime is a symlink to the real zone file
under /usr/share.

Both Solaris and OpenBSD have to deal with the fact that the default
time zone is not known until /usr gets mounted. Which isn't really a big
deal, apart from system log files that insist on using local time for
time stamps (a bug IMHO).

If there are good reasons for Linux to have the default time zone known
before /usr is mounted (dual-boot with Windows maybe) then I can accept
that. In that case, tzdata updates must adjust /etc/localtime (which
shouldn't be a part of glibc either). Time zone changes are legislated,
it is not up to the individual admin to decide whether to implement them
or not. Therefore, a .rpmnew file would be wrong, too.

Cheers
Steffen.

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