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. In short, having a symlink from a file under /etc to a file from a package does not seem to be correct. 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, [...]" -- System Information: Debian Release: 9.5 APT prefers stable-updates APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: i386 Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-7-amd64 (SMP w/16 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=POSIX, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=POSIX (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) Versions of packages tzdata depends on: ii debconf [debconf-2.0] 1.5.61 tzdata recommends no packages. tzdata suggests no packages. -- no debconf information
