[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#911417: udisks2: Uses hardware clock for timestamps on removable media; should be UTC?

[Conrad J.C. Hughes (for Debian package stuff)]

Package: udisks2
Version: 2.1.8-1
Severity: normal

Dear Maintainer,

*** Reporter, please consider answering these questions, where appropriate ***

This may be a feature, or an issue with something higher up (e.g. Gnome) or
lower down (e.g. mount), so please do point me elsewhere if that's appropriate.

I have two very similar systems running jessie, but recently noticed that files
written to VFAT removable media were an hour out between the two - i.e. a file
written at 19:00 on one would show as 20:00 on the other (currently my timezone
is GMT+1, BST).  I eventually tracked this down to the fact that the desktop
ran its hardware clock on local time (LOCAL in /etc/adjtime), while the laptop
had been switched to hardware clock on UTC (UTC in /etc/adjtime).  During the
process of trying to work out why adjtime affects removable media, I found a
number of claims on the Internet that Debian now insists on writing all VFAT
removable media in UTC, because using local time must eventually result in
insanity (or similar).

My experience suggests that the time used on VFAT removable media is in fact
the hardware clock time, which seems surprising: two jessie machines that
display identical clock times will as a result stamp files on a memory card
with different times according to whether they're running their hardware clock
on LOCAL or UTC.  That's a surprising point from which to control such a
behaviour.

Is this intentional?  My search-fu isn't up to finding the point in the
automount stack where this decision is made or documented..

*** End of the template - remove these template lines ***



-- System Information:
Debian Release: 9.5
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-8-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_GB:en (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages udisks2 depends on:
ii  dbus                   1.10.26-0+deb9u1
ii  libacl1                2.2.52-3+b1
ii  libatasmart4           0.19-4+b1
ii  libc6                  2.24-11+deb9u3
ii  libglib2.0-0           2.50.3-2
ii  libgudev-1.0-0         230-3
ii  libpam-systemd         232-25+deb9u4
ii  libpolkit-agent-1-0    0.105-18
ii  libpolkit-gobject-1-0  0.105-18
ii  libsystemd0            232-25+deb9u4
ii  libudisks2-0           2.1.8-1
ii  parted                 3.2-17
ii  udev                   232-25+deb9u4

Versions of packages udisks2 recommends:
ii  dosfstools   4.1-1
ii  eject        2.1.5+deb1+cvs20081104-13.2
ii  exfat-utils  1.2.5-2
ii  gdisk        1.0.1-1
ii  ntfs-3g      1:2016.2.22AR.1+dfsg-1
ii  policykit-1  0.105-18

Versions of packages udisks2 suggests:
pn  btrfs-progs | btrfs-tools  <none>
ii  cryptsetup-bin             2:1.7.3-4
ii  mdadm                      3.4-4+b1
pn  reiserfsprogs              <none>
pn  xfsprogs                   <none>

-- no debconf information