Re: buster netinst timezone
On Sat, Aug 10, 2019 at 12:16:04PM -0500, David Wright wrote:
> If you're desparate to get the timezone altered earlier in your
> installation process, you could always do it manually: try switching
> to VC2 and editing the file /target/etc/timezone to the string UTC
> (the alternatives are simply the names of the files in
> /usr/share/zoneinfo, including subdirectories). Obviously wait until
> the file exists. (I've not tried this so I don't know when that is.)
I'm skeptical that this would be sufficient. Debian actually stores the
system's default timezone in *two* different places, using two completely
different mechanisms. I have been led to believe that one of these is
"standard" for GNU/Linux-based systems, and the other is for backward
compatibility.
wooledg:~$ ls -ld /etc/*time*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 46 Apr 10 2017 /etc/adjtime
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 36 Apr 1 08:58 /etc/localtime -> /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 17 Apr 1 08:58 /etc/timezone
The first one is the /etc/timezone file, which as you say, is a
simple text file that a (root) user can edit. I believe this is the
backward-compatibility one.
The second one is the /etc/localtime symbolic link, which needs to point
to an existing binary time zone data file in /usr/share/zoneinfo. The
symbolic link can be re-pointed by hand; the binary data file should not
be edited by hand.
Running dpkg-reconfigure tzdata changes both of these, so that all the
programs work, regardless of which one they choose to honor. Manually
changing just *one* of them would probably leave the system in an
inconsistent state, where some programs display the correct time zone,
and others do not.
I don't have any kind of statistics for how many programs use one vs.
the other. It's not trivial to find out.
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