On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 2:21 PM, Ionut Biru <ibiru@archlinux.org> wrote:
> On 05/16/2011 09:28 PM, Tom Gundersen wrote:
>> Setting the TIMEZONE in rc.conf is a bad idea for several reasons:
>>
>> ** it requires a reboot before taking effect, for people changing
>> timezone's
>> * *frequently (this is common if you travel a lot, especially annoying if
>> you
>> * *have several stop overs in different timezones and want your laptop's
>> clock
>> * *to be correct)
>> ** it is non-standard, so advice/guides that apply to other distro's will
>> not
>> * *apply to arch
>> ** it is non-standard, so gui tools like the ones found in KDE/GNOME will
>> not
>> * *be aware of the setting in rc.conf, and whatever change they do will be
>> * *overwritten on next boot.
>> ** it is one of the few remaining blockers for ro /etc support in
>> initscripts

If the logic is going to be kept, would it make sense to break it out
into an rc.d script which can then be called by people who switch
timezones?

i.e.:
# /etc/rc.d/timezone America/Chicago

This would also cover the "ro /etc" thing too, as ro users could
simply remove the daemon...

On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 9:35 PM, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin@gmail.com> wrote:
> If the logic is going to be kept, would it make sense to break it out
> into an rc.d script which can then be called by people who switch
> timezones?
>
> i.e.:
> # /etc/rc.d/timezone America/Chicago
>
> This would also cover the "ro /etc" thing too, as ro users could
> simply remove the daemon...

I'd certainly be in favor of having such a script for setting the
timezone (I'll make it if we agree to go forward with this approach).
Don't think we need to have it as a daemon though. At the moment we
write to /etc/localtime if and only if TIMEZONE is set, so even now
the user can avoid writes to /etc/localtime by clearing TIMEZONE (I
don't think most people are aware of this though, nor the problems you
get if you don't do it).

Thanks for your feedback!

Cheers,

Tom

Am Mon, 16 May 2011 20:28:17 +0200
schrieb Tom Gundersen <teg@jklm.no>:

> I cc'ed the GNOME/KDE/XFCE maintainers as I would be interested to
> hear if their timezone tools work well with rc.conf (I think not, but
> I might have missed something). I also cc'ed aif and archboot
> maintainers. Please forward if you know of anyone who maintains
> relevant packages that I left out.

Xfce doesn't have any tool to change/select the timezone.

-Andy