Re: [gentoo-dev] timezone configuration - why copying, not symlinking /etc/localtime ?

[Mike Gilbert <floppym@gentoo.org>]

On Sun, Mar 21, 2021 at 11:06 PM Thomas Deutschmann <whissi@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> On 2021-03-22 03:06, Mike Gilbert wrote:
> > Based on that commit message, it looks systemd switched to looking at
> > the symlink target instead of /etc/timezone well *after* some major
> > distro started using a symlink for /etc/localtime. I suspect Kay
> > Sievers noticed that the content of /etc/timezone and /etc/localtime
> > were redundant on his development machine, and added a TODO entry to
> > eliminate the redundant /etc/timezone file.
> >
> > In other words, this isn't a case of systemd forcing distros to
> > symlink /etc/localtime; they were already doing that anyway.
>
> I just downloaded and tested some old distributions:
>
> Debian 9 was the first Debian release with systemd. Because of systemd,
> /etc/localtime became a symlink. In Debian 8 or when you install Debian
> 9 without systemd, it is a regular file.
>
> Ubuntu 12.04.5 is the same: No systemd, /etc/localtime is a regular
> file. Once they moved to systemd it became a symlink.
>
> In Fedora 17, which is already using systemd but a version before linked
> commit, /etc/localtime is also a regular file. But once Fedora upgraded
> to >=systemd-190 it became a symlink.

Thanks for looking into it. I wonder how Kay's system ended up that
way then. Just a curiosity.

> That's why from my P.O.V. this is clearly caused by systemd. But does
> this matter?

You're the one who brought it up; I'm not sure what the point of that
was, other than to complain about systemd.