Timezone should come from /etc/sysconfig/clock

[cscott]

At the moment we have an /etc/timezone file, which is non-standard.

Bill Nottingham says, "What we do in 'normal' Fedora is we have /etc/sysconfig/clock that has a ZONE= line; when this is changed, tzdata-update is run. (tzdata-update is also run on tzdata upgrades.)"

That's what we should do, too.

[cscott]

This should be synchronized with sugar-control-panel.

[erikos]

Sugar-control-panel actually looks for the /etc/sysconfig/clock. This is the file where we write the settings to when we change the timezone besides copying the correct timezone from /usr/share/zoneinfo/ to /etc/timezone. The sugar control panel's timezone feature was based on the system-config-date one.

Please close this ticket if this is the desired behavior.

[marco]

Back to cscott to verify it's what he wants and close the ticket.

[cscott]

Erikos: please remove the write to /etc/timezone; let's deprecate that and I'll remove it from pilgrim. Do you re-run tzdata-update after writing to /etc/sysconfig/clock ?

[marco]

It's unclear from the report what's the user visible problem.

[cscott]

My testing with joyride seems to indicate that 'sugar-control-panel -s timezone' doesn't work. Running it in a terminal, it complains, "Permission denied. You need to be root to run this method." When I "su -" to root, I get a traceback: "RuntimeError: The SUGAR_PATH environment variable is not set". So I couldn't confirm that tzdata-update is actually being called after we write to /etc/sysconfig/clock. Properly setting the timezone is, I believe, an update.1 item.

Additional issues uncovered: 1) No way to know what the valid time zones are. 2) My clock was incorrectly set and I saw no obvious way to reset it. 3) Although MP machines are supposed to have clocks set to GMT, anecdotal reports have been that they are set to China time instead. Can we workaround this, to minimize the necessity for (2)?

[erikos]

Replying to cscott:

My testing with joyride seems to indicate that 'sugar-control-panel -s timezone' doesn't work. Running it in a terminal, it complains, "Permission denied. You need to be root to run this method." When I "su -" to root, I get a traceback: "RuntimeError: The SUGAR_PATH environment variable is not set". So I couldn't confirm that tzdata-update is actually being called after we write to /etc/sysconfig/clock. Properly setting the timezone is, I believe, an update.1 item.

use su only. su - changes the environment.

Additional issues uncovered: 1) No way to know what the valid time zones are. 2) My clock was incorrectly set and I saw no obvious way to reset it. 3) Although MP machines are supposed to have clocks set to GMT, anecdotal reports have been that they are set to China time instead. Can we workaround this, to minimize the necessity for (2)?

Well we need to set the correct time first since timezone is an offset only. if people have network connection they can use rdate to get the clock correct.

[cscott]

OK, part of my problem was that I did 'su -' above, instead of just 'su'. But changing from su to sudo might break sugar-control-panel; I made a note in #5537 to ensure that SUGAR_PATH is preserved. Are there other environment variables which Sugar needs saved?

sugar-control-panel in joyride-1424 seems already not to write to /etc/timezone, so that file can probably be safely removed. I assume we're running tzdata-update correctly, as /etc/localtime seems to be updated after the write to /etc/sysconfig/clock.

In any case, it seems like the only remaining work on this ticket is getting rid of /etc/timezone in pilgrim. I opened #5561 for "no way to set clock" and #5562 for "no way to know what valid time zones are".

[cscott]

tzdata-update is a terrifying piece of code! http://pastebin.ca/823971 from glibc-20070515T2025/fedora/tzdata-update.c

Nonetheless, it doesn't seem to be doing anything too fancy: it updates /var/spool/postfix/etc/localtime as well as /etc/localtime, takes care not to write to the file unless the time zone really as changed, and contains a lot of crap which looks to be present solely to avoid any dependency on glibc.

So I think it's perfectly safe to *not* use this monstrosity, and write /etc/localtime on our own.

[cscott]

I opened #5563 to ensure that the time zone data is preserved across upgrades, and updated when the timezone database changes.

[cscott]

Ok, joyride pilgrim has been patched to use /etc/sysconfig/clock instead of /etc/timezone. But see #5603. The machines come set to GMT from the factory, but if you set it to something else you can never reset it to GMT.

[cscott]

This is a pilgrim patch; assign back to cscott after approval for commit to the update.1 pilgrim branch.

[jg]

Approved.

[marco]

Is this in yet?

[erikos]

One part of the sugar-control-panel is missing. It is true that once you set to something else than GMT you can not set it back since s-c-p parses /usr/share/zoneinfo/zone.tab to get the available options which does not include GMT :/

[erikos]

The rest of the fixes scott describes are working afaict.

[cscott]

Replying to erikos:

One part of the sugar-control-panel is missing. It is true that once you set to something else than GMT you can not set it back since s-c-p parses /usr/share/zoneinfo/zone.tab to get the available options which does not include GMT :/

You are describing #5603. I believe this bug can be closed.