tzdata upgrade dies, killing apt w/o fixing the tty, when /etc/localtime is protected

[James Cloos]

When /etc/localtime is protected from manipulation, such as with the immutable flag — something which is often required when leasing virtuals, to keep the vendors’ frameworks from screwing with the filesystem — an update to tzdata will crap out, killing dpkg and apt, which leaves the tty a mess.

Instead, should it be impossible to overwrite the existing /etc/localtime, the script should continue without error.

[Benjamin Drung (bdrung)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better.

/etc/localtime is a symlink and therefore setting the immutable flag is not possible:

```
$ lsattr /etc/localtime
lsattr: Operation not supported While reading flags on /etc/localtime
```

If you make files in /usr/share/zoneinfo immutable, it will be no surprise that apt will fail to replace them on a tzdata update.

Can you describe how to replicate your setup step by step?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for tzdata (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]