Bug#1043250: tzdata: bring back top-level UTC
On Mon, 2023-08-07 at 23:20 +0200, Thorsten Glaser wrote:
> Package: tzdata
> Version: 2023c-8
> Severity: important
> X-Debbugs-Cc: tg@mirbsd.de
>
> Please bring back at the *very* least the top-level UTC symlink,
> as TZ=UTC is used in *so* many places to get UTC it’s not funny.
Can you point to examples for it? Most of these cases should probably
use TZ=UTC0 which work without having any timezone data files.
Moving it back will be fine to unbreak those cases.
I searched for TZ=UTC on codesearch.debian.net and all hits that I
looked at were false positives for Python code that uses tz=utc (where
utc = datetime.UTC).
> A second candidate, although less used recently, is the top-level
> GMT symlink.
I haven't used GMT myself and I am not aware of any users. Do you know
packages that use/hardcode GMT? I haven't found TZ=GMT on
codesearch.debian.net.
> These are bound to be hardcoded in so many places, and Etc/UTC is
> *not* a substitute, nor is running that without the files (in some
> corner cases).
Why isn't Etc/UTC an alternative to UTC?
--
Benjamin Drung
Debian & Ubuntu Developer
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