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.

That's why from my P.O.V. this is clearly caused by systemd. But does this matter? I doubt that systemd will even think about removing what I believe to be a false warning when systemd detects that /etc/localtime is a regular file. So let's focus on dealing with the fallout...


--
Regards,
Thomas Deutschmann / Gentoo Linux Developer
fpr: C4DD 695F A713 8F24 2AA1 5638 5849 7EE5 1D5D 74A5

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