Bug#822733: tzdata: Drop /etc/timezone
On Sun, 2023-01-29 at 15:45 +0100, Michael Biebl wrote:
> Am 29.01.2023 um 15:38 schrieb Luca Boccassi:
> > On Sun, 29 Jan 2023, 13:15 Michael Biebl, <biebl@debian.org
> > <mailto:biebl@debian.org>> wrote:
> >
> > Am 28.01.2023 um 02:12 schrieb Luca Boccassi:
> > > I'm looking at this again, because handling /etc/timezone is one
> > of the
> > > last large technical debt patches that we carry in Debian for
> > > src:systemd, and we want to drop it for Trixie.
> > > The idea is to add a tmpfiles.d entry in the systemd package that
> > > unconditionally deletes /etc/timezone if present. If someone wants to
> > > keep using it, they can simply override the tmpfiles.d entry with the
> > > usual mechanisms.
> > >
> > > So, could you please reconsider the proposal to stop creating it
> > if it
> > > doesn't exist (but keep updating if it does) in the tzdata
> > postinst as
> > > above for Trixie?
> >
> > I'm a bit confused: If you forcefully want to delete /etc/timezone
> > via a
> > tmpfiles snippet, why let tzdata update an existing /etc/timezone?
> >
> >
> > Because it can be overridden as mentioned, so in case there are unknown
> > corner cases where it's still needed, a drop-in can be added to avoid
> > deleting the file and it will still get updated. In the future we can
> > then consider removing this as well.
> >
>
> I would prefer, if all this is handled within tzdata.
> - It should stop creating /etc/timezone
> - It should delete /etc/timezone on upgrades as a one-time action
> - If users manually create the file afterwards (say touch /etc/timezone)
> a dpkg-reconfigure tzdata would update the file.
I will implement exactly this for tzdata since that approach makes the
most sense.
--
Benjamin Drung
Debian & Ubuntu Developer
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