On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 9:21 PM, Ionut Biru <ibiru@archlinux.org> wrote:
i found that deprecating this option will make the set up a bit more complicated and i don't really want to copy/symlink or run tzselect manually.
tzselect doesn't actually set the system timezone (only for your current session), but it would be very easy to wrap it in a small shell script that would set the system time based on your choice. This adds the benefit over setting TIMEZONE that it will give you a menu of choices rather than asking you to look it up in the fs.
I cc'ed the GNOME/KDE/XFCE maintainers as I would be interested to hear if their timezone tools work well with rc.conf (I think not, but I might have missed something). I also cc'ed aif and archboot maintainers. Please forward if you know of anyone who maintains relevant packages that I left out.
gnome is perfectly capable to do this, with or without asking an administrator password. For the later we need some adjustment to polkit rules.
Just a clarification: when you set the timezone in gnome, does it overwrite /etc/localtime and update TIMEZONE in rc.conf to match? My experiment with KDE it updates /etc/localtime, but not rc.conf, so at next boot the timezone is reset to the old value.
we shouldn't focus only on gnome/kde/xfce since they are fully featured desktop environments and have tools for setting the date/time/.
My idea was to make sure that all tools that might set /etc/localtime work well with arch (I only mentioned the DE as they are the ones where I know tools exist, there might be more). That means that they either have to be patched to update rc.conf, or that we should make sure not to overwrite the changes they do.
What about minimal setups, they don't have any tools like that and they need to do it manually and is an additional step that is not needed in my opinion.
I'd be happy to include a small command line tool to do this (using tzselect, or the syntax Aaron suggested, or both). Thanks for your feedback :-) Tom