Bug#688318: tzdata packages updates consistently cause /etc/timezone to be reset to an undesirable value
On 2023-01-06 20:33, Benjamin Drung wrote:
> 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.
From a maintainer point of view (consistency), and also from a European
point of view, the first option looks the best. But I think US users are
used to timezones and not cities to select their timezones, so option 2
is probably the best here, even if considered as deprecated upstream.
Regards
Aurelien
--
Aurelien Jarno GPG: 4096R/1DDD8C9B
aurelien@aurel32.net http://www.aurel32.net
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