On 2018-08-12 03:24, Vincent Lefevre wrote: > Package: tzdata > Version: 2018e-0+deb9u1 > Severity: important > > On a Debian 9 machine: > > patate:~> TZ=UTC date; TZ=UTC0 date > Sun Aug 12 03:02:35 CEST 2018 > Sun Aug 12 01:02:35 UTC 2018 > > The first line is based on the /usr/share/zoneinfo/UTC file according > to strace, but this is wrong as CEST is not UTC. The file is: > > -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2971 2018-05-15 10:01:38 /usr/share/zoneinfo/UTC > > which doesn't seem to be the original one. I assume that it got > corrupted via a write to /etc/localtime, but /etc/localtime is > a symlink to /usr/share/zoneinfo/Etc/UTC, which is itself a > symlink to /usr/share/zoneinfo/UTC. > > Now, could the write to /etc/localtime be regarded as a bug? > Probably not, because /etc/localtime is a config file, and one > is allowed to write to config files under /etc.
I don't think it should be regarded as a bug. The fact it's a conffile means that you can replace the symlink by another one or by a file, and that dpkg and the maintainer script should keep the changes. It doesn't mean anything about what the user can do about it. > In short, having a symlink from a file under /etc to a file from > a package does not seem to be correct. This is nothing new, on a normal installation there are hundred of links in /etc pointing to a file under /usr. For me the bug is in the application writing the content instead of replacing the symlink. > BTW, on https://www.virtualmin.com/node/15246 someone mentioned > another issue with a symlink: "It's not really wise to make > /etc/localtime a symlink. That used to be the standard behavior for > Linux in the past, but then someone realized that /usr/share/zoneinfo > could be on a different volume that's not always mounted, and we > definitely don't want to be without /etc/localtime, [...]" This is used to be a copy, to handle the case where /usr is mounted late in the boot script. Since Jessie (initramfs-tools 0.117), it is guaranteed that /usr is mounted in the initramfs, so it's possible to use a symlink. The switch to a symlink has been done so that systemd (#803144), and recent desktop environments can work on Debian. On other distributions /etc/timezone does not exist and the timezone configuration can be checked by looking where the symlink points to. In summary I don't believe there is a bug in tzdata. The bug should be reassigned to the package wrongly changing /etc/localtime. Aurelien -- Aurelien Jarno GPG: 4096R/1DDD8C9B aurel...@aurel32.net http://www.aurel32.net
