Bug#503189: tzsetup: Preseeding timezone doesn't work as described

[Durk Strooisma <durk@kern.nl>]

Package: tzsetup
Version: 1:0.23
Severity: normal


Hi all,

I noticed that somewhere between lenny beta 2 and the latest daily
builds there's a difference in how you effectivily preseed the
timezone.

In lenny beta 2, these lines were sufficient to set the timezone to
Europe/Amsterdam while having the locale set to en_US:

d-i debian-installer/locale string en_US
d-i time/zone string Europe/Amsterdam

Unlike the latest D-I manual states, this doesn't work in the latest
daily builds anymore. The timezone will be forced to US/Eastern. To
figure this out, I ran a manual (expert) installation and noticed that
the timezone choices are based on the locale settings.

I tried to add:

d-i localechooser/shortlist select other
d-i localechooser/continentlist select Europe
d-i localechooser/countrylist/Europe select NL

but it didn't work.

During a manual (expert) install it's perfectly possible to choose
English with country Netherlands, so that it is possible to choose
Europe/Amsterdam as timezone.

In a discussion on the debian-boot mailinglist, Christian Perrier
proposed[1] to try changing the locale from "en_US" to "en_NL". This
actually works! Unlike you would expect, but desired however, the
locale on the target system will be en_US.UTF-8.

So, if this is the way we should preseed the timezone from now on, the
D-I manual must be changed to reflect this.

Durk

[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2008/10/msg00617.html


-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.26-1-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash