Australian timezone oddity between two similarly configured FC4 boxes

Paul Howarth paul at city-fan.org
Tue Mar 28 11:15:28 UTC 2006


Steffen Kluge wrote:
> 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.

Looking at 
http://cvs.fedora.redhat.com/viewcvs/devel/glibc/glibc.spec?view=markup, 
it's a copy of /usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Eastern

> 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.

Maybe I get .rpmnew files because I changed the local timezone from 
US/Eastern? I'd expect that would affect a lot more people though.

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

I think it used to be in Red Hat Linux too. The glibc spec file shows 
traces of this:

# /etc/localtime
rm -f $RPM_BUILD_ROOT/etc/localtime
cp -f $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_prefix}/share/zoneinfo/US/Eastern 
$RPM_BUILD_ROOT/etc/localtime
#ln -sf ..%{_prefix}/share/zoneinfo/US/Eastern $RPM_BUILD_ROOT/etc/localtime

I think this may have been changed because of rpm's poor handling of 
symlinks (e.g. it doesn't like changing between symlinks and real files 
on package upgrades).

> 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.

I agree. It would be better to have a config file specifying the 
timezone to use, and a post-install script copying the right timezone 
data to /etc/localtime.

Paul.




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