Timothy Sample dixit (2019-05-18, 14:43): > Hi again, > > Timothy Sample <samp...@ngyro.com> writes: > > > Hello, > > > > Ludovic Courtès <l...@gnu.org> writes: > > > >> Hi Ben, > >> > >> Ben Sturmfels <b...@sturm.com.au> skribis: > >> > >>> In Evolution though, all my calendar events show up in UTC time, so I > >>> have appointments showing up at eg. 1am. > >>> > >>> When I go to Edit, Preferences, Calendar and Task, General, under > >>> timezone it says: > >>> > >>> [x] Use system time (UTC) > >> > >> Could you figure out how Evolution determines what the current time zone > >> is? > >> > >> Guix provides /etc/localtime, which is what libc functions use, but I’m > >> guessing Evolution uses a custom framework, possibly involving a > >> hard-to-believe network of D-Bus services. > > > > I just looked through the source code, and learned that it really, > > really wants “/etc/localtime” to be a symlink, because it wants to > > resolve which timezone alias the user is using, not just the data. If > > it is not a symlink, it runs through a bunch of system specific checks > > (looking up configuration files, etc.) and then tries to compare inodes > > and finally file contents. I get why it wants the name and not just the > > data, but I’m not sure why it tries to figure out the absolute canonical > > source file for the timezone data instead of just taking the data from > > “/etc/localtime”. > > > > It’s easy to patch “evolution-data-server”, but maybe we could do > > better? It seems the “right” way to do what they are doing is to check > > the “TZ” environment variable. However, we don’t set that anymore > > because it causes problems with setuid programs > > (cf. <https://bugs.gnu.org/29212>). We have a comment that says that > > “TZ” is unnecessary, but it actually has a bit more information than > > just having data in “/etc/localtime”, since it could be the name of a > > timezone alias. A small improvement might be to make “/etc/localtime” a > > symlink, but that might run into the same issues described the bug. > > Okay, so it turns I don’t know what “TZ” is! :p > > It does not contain the timezone name, like “America/New_York”, but > rather its designation, like “EST”. What “evolution-data-server” wants > is the name. > > > I’ve noticed a few other problems with timezones in the GNOME ecosystem, > > which is why I was curious about this. Perhaps they all have a common > > root cause. > > > > I’m happy to patch this as stop-gap measure, but is there some way we > > could “do the right thing” here? > > I guess there is no standard way to get the name of the system timezone, > and that is why “evolution-data-server” goes to such great lengths to > figure it out. > > Sorry for the noise! > > > -- Tim >
Hey Guix, This problem seems to be also present also for other programs such as GNU IceCat which reads UTC timezone every time, despite Europe/Warsaw being set in my config.scm. -- sirmacik PGP: 0xE0DC81D523891771
