should be possible to display other timezone without changing system timezone

[L. David Baron]

I just upgraded and switched to Unity, and I'm trying to set things up like I had them before.

I've always kept my system clocks in UTC, and set the TZ environment variable for local time in ~/.bashrc (affecting everything in my user account). This provides sanity both for logs and for mounting DOS filesystems from, e.g., a camera (whose clock I also keep in UTC, and thus don't have to change when traveling or for summer time).

I'd like to be able to display a clock in the menu bar that shows my user time zone *without* having it change the system clock. Ideally it would do this by learning the timezone the way pretty much every other app does, and like the GNOME 2 clock applet does. I'd be ok if it could do it some other way.

(I'd think this would also be useful for things like VNC sessions.)

Steps to reproduce:
 1. make /etc/timezone contain the string "UTC"
 2. put "export TZ=America/Los_Angeles" in ~/.bashrc
 3. log in
 4. click gear icon in upper right corner -> system settings -> time & date -> clock -> check "show a clock in the menu bar"
 5. set (above) -> time & date -> time & date -> Location to America/Los_Angeles instead of UTC

Actual results:
 4. clock shows UTC rather than PST
 5. /etc/timezone file gets changed

Expected results:
  At least have some option that lets me show PST without causing /etc/timezone to change

[Charles Kerr (charlesk)]

Marking incomplete for indicator-datetime pending feedback from Design