Comment 9 for bug 89069

Revision history for this message
Wenzhuo Zhang (wenzhuo) wrote :

Assume you are currently in China, and the hardware clock of your computer is set to Beijing time (GMT+800) to accommodate the requirement of Windows. After booting the feisty desktop-i386 CD, the system clock is the correct GMT time, which is obtained from a time server on the network shortly after the network interface is up. When Ubiquity starts to do the real installation job, it updates the system clock to Beijing time, but without changing the timezone accordingly. You can notice the time change on the Gnome Date&Time applet and confirm that the timezone does not get updated by using the date command . This mistake makes the system clock 8 hours ahead of the current time, and hence the last modified/write time recorded in ext3 superblocks.

There is a loophole in the reasonings of my posts yesterday. I missed one important thing: when the RTC device is being added upon normal system booting, a udev rule gets applied to correctly initialize the system clock from the hardware clock, by taking timezone into consideration. This invalidates my conclusion about bug 63175, but on the contrary confirms the root cause of this bug (bug 89069).