Comment 40 for bug 26926

On Mon, 01 May 2006, Mike Dornberger wrote:
> is /etc/localtime a symlink to save space on the rootfs or to easily see
> what timezone the system is running?

It did both, but in hindsight it was a major design error.

Current code can very easily be changed (been there, done that, didn't get
any bad side-effects to date) to drop the symlink and use either handlinks
(if /usr is in the same partition -- in which case a symlink would do just
fine as well :( ) or copy the data from /usr.

> If the latter, and /usr is a mountpoint, why not (with some debconf stuff;

You don't need to add this much complexity to fix the issue, you can just do
as Fedora Core does, and cp <timezone file> /etc/localtime. Only a few
*debian* scripts need to be fixed to not place a symlink back in there, and
some documentation needs to be updated.

> Maybe the libc6, initscripts and util-linux maintainers have to work
> together for keeping things in sync then. (Changing local timezone?)

You need the libc6 package to provide proper /etc/localtime at early boot
(i.e. to use cp and not symlinks if /usr is a separate partition). You need
the util-linux package to fix the broken hwclock scripts. You don't need
the initscripts package to do anything.

--
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  Henrique Holschuh