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

[Tom Gundersen]

On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 9:21 PM, Ionut Biru <ibiru at 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