Bug#822733: tzdata: Drop /etc/timezone

[Luca Boccassi]

On Mon, 6 Feb 2023 at 13:13, Benjamin Drung <bdrung at debian.org> wrote:
>
> On Sun, 2023-01-29 at 15:45 +0100, Michael Biebl wrote:
> > Am 29.01.2023 um 15:38 schrieb Luca Boccassi:
> > > On Sun, 29 Jan 2023, 13:15 Michael Biebl, <biebl at debian.org
> > > <mailto:biebl at debian.org>> wrote:
> > >
> > >     Am 28.01.2023 um 02:12 schrieb Luca Boccassi:
> > >      > I'm looking at this again, because handling /etc/timezone is one
> > >     of the
> > >      > last large technical debt patches that we carry in Debian for
> > >      > src:systemd, and we want to drop it for Trixie.
> > >      > The idea is to add a tmpfiles.d entry in the systemd package that
> > >      > unconditionally deletes /etc/timezone if present. If someone wants to
> > >      > keep using it, they can simply override the tmpfiles.d entry with the
> > >      > usual mechanisms.
> > >      >
> > >      > So, could you please reconsider the proposal to stop creating it
> > >     if it
> > >      > doesn't exist (but keep updating if it does) in the tzdata
> > >     postinst as
> > >      > above for Trixie?
> > >
> > >     I'm a bit confused: If you forcefully want to delete /etc/timezone
> > >     via a
> > >     tmpfiles snippet, why let tzdata update an existing /etc/timezone?
> > >
> > >
> > > Because it can be overridden as mentioned, so in case there are unknown
> > > corner cases where it's still needed, a drop-in can be added to avoid
> > > deleting the file and it will still get updated. In the future we can
> > > then consider removing this as well.
> > >
> >
> > I would prefer, if all this is handled within tzdata.
> > - It should stop creating /etc/timezone
> > - It should delete /etc/timezone on upgrades as a one-time action
> > - If users manually create the file afterwards (say touch /etc/timezone)
> > a dpkg-reconfigure tzdata would update the file.
>
> I will implement exactly this for tzdata since that approach makes the
> most sense.

Sounds great, thank you