Bug#688318: tzdata packages updates consistently cause /etc/timezone to be reset to an undesirable value
On Fri, 21 Sep 2012 09:25:50 -0500 Shelby Cain <alyandon@hotmail.com>
wrote:
> Package: tzdata
> Version: 2012e-0ubuntu0.12.04.1
> Severity: important
>
> Every time an update to the tzdata package is published, it results in
my /etc/timezone being reset from
> "US/Central" to "America/Chicago". While technically America/Chicago
is indeed the same timezone, it is
> unintuitive to say the least considering the fact that I live 929
miles (~1500 km) from Chicago, Illinois.
There are symlinks in /usr/share/zoneinfo for backward compatibility.
US/Central is a symlink pointing to America/Chicago.
The Debian package updates some of those backward compatible symlinks to
their new targets (see convert_timezone in debian/tzdata.config). This
is useful for changes like renaming Kiev to Kyiv. These timezones that
are updated are not presented as option in debconf – except for the
symlinks in US. This is inconsistent and needs to be fixed.
So there are two possible solution:
1. Drop the US area from the debconf template. Then only continents and
oceans remain as areas. This would be more consistent.
2. Drop the US/* timezones from convert_timezone.
It tend to prefer option one (for consistency), but I can see that users
might find option two easier for them.
--
Benjamin Drung
Debian & Ubuntu Developer
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