Bug#822733: tzdata: Drop /etc/timezone

[Michael Biebl]

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.

This should all be under tzdata's control.

Michael
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