[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#422368: /etc/avahi/etc/localtime keeps changing during boot

[Lennart Poettering]

On Sat, 05.05.07 14:40, Michael Tautschnig (tautschn at model.in.tum.de) wrote:

> Package: avahi-daemon
> Version: 0.6.16-3etch1
> Severity: important
> Justification: Violates policy/FHS
> 
> Upon startup, the following code is executed by /etc/init.d/avahi-daemon: 
> 
>     if [ -s /etc/localtime ]; then
>         if [ ! -d /etc/avahi/etc ]; then
>             mkdir -p /etc/avahi/etc >/dev/null 2>&1
>         fi
>         cp -fp /etc/localtime /etc/avahi/etc >/dev/null 2>&1
>     fi;
> 
> The mkdir and cp operations, apart from being very very strange, violate the FHS
> implication of /etc/ being static. Maybe there is some upstream bug that expects
> to find localtime in /etc/avahi/etc/localtime, but in any case this could be
> easily worked around by creating /etc/avahi/etc and a symlink to /etc/localtime
> within the postinst script. IMHO.

Just a few notes as Avahi upstream maintainer:

symlinking this will *not* work. avahi-daemon chroot()s to that
directory, i.e. wouldn't be able to followup the symlink.

That locatime modification is Debian specific. The other distros
don't have it.

The bug might have gone away with libc 2.5.

Also, calling tzset() before chroot()ing might be a way to work around
this.

I am now a RH employee, using Fedora on my desktop machines, hence I
am unable to test this right now. 

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering; lennart [at] poettering [dot] net
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