Steffen Kluge wrote:
On Tue, 2006-03-28 at 07:11 +0100, Paul Howarth wrote:
I always get a /etc/localtime.rpmnew when there's a glibc update. Same
again today on my last FC4 box.
This is all messed up. In the olden days (RH Linux), zone files were
part of glibc-common and /etc/localtime was part of glibc. I wonder what
the content of the original /etc/localtime was (as found in the package)
- it would have been pretty nonsensical for most parts of the world.
Looking at
http://cvs.fedora.redhat.com/viewcvs/devel/glibc/glibc.spec?view=markup,
it's a copy of /usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Eastern
Things are slightly different in Fedora (as of FC4 at least). Zone files
are part of the new tzdata package, and /etc/localtime still comes with
glibc. However, no /etc/localtime.rpmnew file ever got created on my FC4
systems. Maybe your's stems from RH Linux days? When zone file updates
actually made an attempt to do the right thing? That said, I reckon the
right thing to do would be creating a .rpmsave file, and overwriting
localtime with the new zone definition.
Maybe I get .rpmnew files because I changed the local timezone from
US/Eastern? I'd expect that would affect a lot more people though.
In OpenBSD, /etc/localtime is a symlink to the real zone file
under /usr/share.
I think it used to be in Red Hat Linux too. The glibc spec file shows
traces of this:
# /etc/localtime
rm -f $RPM_BUILD_ROOT/etc/localtime
cp -f $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_prefix}/share/zoneinfo/US/Eastern
$RPM_BUILD_ROOT/etc/localtime
#ln -sf ..%{_prefix}/share/zoneinfo/US/Eastern $RPM_BUILD_ROOT/etc/localtime
I think this may have been changed because of rpm's poor handling of
symlinks (e.g. it doesn't like changing between symlinks and real files
on package upgrades).
If there are good reasons for Linux to have the default time zone known
before /usr is mounted (dual-boot with Windows maybe) then I can accept
that. In that case, tzdata updates must adjust /etc/localtime (which
shouldn't be a part of glibc either). Time zone changes are legislated,
it is not up to the individual admin to decide whether to implement them
or not. Therefore, a .rpmnew file would be wrong, too.
I agree. It would be better to have a config file specifying the
timezone to use, and a post-install script copying the right timezone
data to /etc/localtime.
Paul.
