Bug#688318: tzdata packages updates consistently cause /etc/timezone to be reset to an undesirable value

[alyandon@hotmail.com]

January 6, 2023 2:33 PM, "Benjamin Drung" <bdrung@debian.org> wrote:

> 
> 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

It is certainly a confusing UX but I’ve long since given up fighting it and
use American/Chicago (or whatever the city name based timezone is) as the
timezone.

However, I can state (as an American) that if I walk up to someone on the 
street and ask them what timezone we are in they are going to reply Central, 
Mountain, Eastern, Pacific, etc and not Chicago, Denver, New York, Los 
Angeles, etc.  It's just not a way people think about timezones here vs the
rest of the world I suppose?

Regardless, the real confusion has always been that tzdata package updates
aren't changing anything about the America/*, US/* timezones so why is it 
touching my /etc/timezone at all?  As a developer in a previous life, I
assume some sort of call to is being made to a validation function that is
resolving the symlink based path to the real path?

For what it is worth, I do generally prefer consistency as well.

Shelby