On Sun, Mar 21, 2021 at 11:06 PM Thomas Deutschmann <whi...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > On 2021-03-22 03:06, Mike Gilbert wrote: > > 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. > > I just downloaded and tested some old distributions: > > Debian 9 was the first Debian release with systemd. Because of systemd, > /etc/localtime became a symlink. In Debian 8 or when you install Debian > 9 without systemd, it is a regular file. > > Ubuntu 12.04.5 is the same: No systemd, /etc/localtime is a regular > file. Once they moved to systemd it became a symlink. > > In Fedora 17, which is already using systemd but a version before linked > commit, /etc/localtime is also a regular file. But once Fedora upgraded > to >=systemd-190 it became a symlink.
Thanks for looking into it. I wonder how Kay's system ended up that way then. Just a curiosity. > That's why from my P.O.V. this is clearly caused by systemd. But does > this matter? You're the one who brought it up; I'm not sure what the point of that was, other than to complain about systemd.
