[arch-dev-public] [initscripts][RFC] deprecating TIMEZONE from rc.conf

[Ionut Biru]

On 05/16/2011 09:28 PM, Tom Gundersen wrote:
> Hi guys,
>

hi,
i'm forwarding this on our arch-dev-public  ml for higher audience

> I think the TIMEZONE variable in rc.conf is unnecessary and it causes
> some problems with other (especially GUI) tools. I'd like to hear what
> you think about deprecating it. We will still keep the support for it
> in initscripts, but we will suggest (in the standard rc.conf) to not
> set it. It will then be up to the maintainer of our installer(s) and
> documentation to adopt (or not) this suggestion.
>

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.

> 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.

we shouldn't focus only on gnome/kde/xfce since they are fully featured 
  desktop environments and have tools for setting the date/time/.

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.

>
>  From fd5fd34f8a593710483a204d7a7984f89385e3fa Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
> From: Tom Gundersen<teg at jklm.no>
> Date: Mon, 16 May 2011 13:17:48 +0200
> Subject: [PATCH] timezone: deprecate the TIMEZONE variable
>
> Setting the TIMEZONE in rc.conf is a bad idea for several reasons:
>
>   * it requires a reboot before taking effect, for people changing timezone's
>     frequently (this is common if you travel a lot, especially annoying if you
>     have several stop overs in different timezones and want your laptop's clock
>     to be correct)
>   * it is non-standard, so advice/guides that apply to other distro's will not
>     apply to arch
>   * it is non-standard, so gui tools like the ones found in KDE/GNOME will not
>     be aware of the setting in rc.conf, and whatever change they do will be
>     overwritten on next boot.
>   * it is one of the few remaining blockers for ro /etc support in initscripts
>
> For these reasons (and possibly more), we deprecate TIMEZONE from rc.conf,
> and advice users and developers to clear it and set /etc/localtime directly.
> However, we do not remove the implementation from the scripts, so the timezone
> is still set during boot/shutdown if the variable is set.
>
> Signed-off-by: Tom Gundersen<teg at jklm.no>
> ---
>   rc.conf |    7 ++++---
>   1 files changed, 4 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)
>
> diff --git a/rc.conf b/rc.conf
> index 89ea27e..0fb6472 100644
> --- a/rc.conf
> +++ b/rc.conf
> @@ -8,11 +8,13 @@
>   #
>   # LOCALE: available languages can be listed with the 'locale -a' command
>   # DAEMON_LOCALE: If set to 'yes', use $LOCALE as the locale during daemon
>   # startup and during the boot process. If set to 'no', the C locale is used.
>   # HARDWARECLOCK: set to "UTC" or "localtime", any other value will result
>   #   in the hardware clock being left untouched (useful for virtualization)
>   #   Note: Using "localtime" is discouraged.
> -# TIMEZONE: timezones are found in /usr/share/zoneinfo
> +# TIMEZONE: (DEPRECATED) copy timezone from /usr/share/zoneinfo to
> +#   /etc/localtime instead
>   # KEYMAP: keymaps are found in /usr/share/kbd/keymaps
>   # CONSOLEFONT: found in /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts (only needed for non-US)
>   # CONSOLEMAP: found in /usr/share/kbd/consoletrans
> @@ -22,7 +24,6 @@
>   LOCALE="en_US.UTF-8"
>   DAEMON_LOCALE="no"
>   HARDWARECLOCK="UTC"
> -TIMEZONE="Canada/Pacific"
>   KEYMAP="us"
>   CONSOLEFONT=
>   CONSOLEMAP=


-- 
Ionuț