[arch-general] pacman.log has no timezone information in timestamp

[ProgAndy]

Am 02.03.19 um 02:43 schrieb Juha Kankare via arch-general:
> On 02/03/2019 02:23, ProgAndy wrote:
> 
>> Am 02.03.19 um 01:12 schrieb mpan:
>>>> I just used the /var/log/pacman.log for the first time to give me the
>>>> last date-time I did a system upgrade ('starting full system upgrade' in
>>>> the log). There is no time-zone info in the time-stamp. It's also not
>>>> UTC. Does anyone know if this is by design or a bug?
>>> `pacman` uses local time of your system. Indeed it seems like an 
>>> ommision.
>>>
>>> You may consider opening a feature request, so pacman.conf would allow
>>> either an option to include TZ in the logs (good idea) or setting custom
>>> time format (worse idea, as this would bind `pacman` codebase to the
>>> specific time formatting function).
>>>
>>
>> Meanwhile you can explicitly set the timezone to UTC when calling
>> pacman, that way the log will be consistent:
>>
>> $ TZ=UTC sudo pacman ...
>>
>> --
>> ProgAndy
> 
> For some reason, ' $ TZ=UTC sudo pacman' and '$ sudo TZ=UTC pacman' both 
> work, but '$ alias pacman="TZ=UTC pacman"' and then '$ sudo pacman' 
> doesn't, even though (from what I know) it should be practically equal 
> to '$ sudo TZ=UTC pacman'. Not sure why, but it was worth a shot. Any 
> other way to automate this TZ=UTC for pacman so you don't have to type 
> it every time. Maybe a wrapper script aliased to "upacman" or something?
> 

Declaring an environment variable that way is a feature of some shells.
It may not work in an alias, so you can use the env binary instead:

alias pacman="env TZ=UTC pacman "

A function should work as well

pacman() {
  TZ=UTC /usr/bin/pacman "$@"
}