On Sun, Mar 21, 2021 at 7:58 PM Thomas Deutschmann <whi...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > On 2021-03-20 16:37, Andreas K. Huettel wrote: > > 2) Most other distros seem to just do > > No, not most distros are doing that. systemd is forcing that downstream > (the result is the same)! > > It was added via > https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/92c4ef2d357baeef78b6f82f119b92f7ed12ac77 > without mentioning a reason.
Based on that commit message, it looks systemd switched to looking at the symlink target instead of /etc/timezone well *after* some major distro started using a symlink for /etc/localtime. I suspect Kay Sievers noticed that the content of /etc/timezone and /etc/localtime were redundant on his development machine, and added a TODO entry to eliminate the redundant /etc/timezone file. In other words, this isn't a case of systemd forcing distros to symlink /etc/localtime; they were already doing that anyway.
