Re: New clock applet for 2.22

[Alex Jones <alex weej com>]

On Tue, 2007-09-25 at 17:22 -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
> I'm just saying that if you want the timezone stored elsewhere you need
> to make sure that the C library will pick it up. Do you disagree?
↓
> (FWIW, it's pretty unclear to me what you mean, but I think you're
> trying to say that the timezone should be a per-user or per-session
> property. That's an admirable goal and in line with most of the other
> work I've personally been involved in doing for GNOME (moving things
> from system- to session-scope: HAL, NM etc.). For example, one
> application of this would be a huge central mainframe serving thin
> clients from multiple locations in different timezones.)
So what sense does /etc/"local"time have then? 
> I think you just need to realize the world is a helluva lot bigger than
> GNOME and pure crack like having date(1) return something different than
> what my GNOME clock shows is just not a viable approach in the real
> world.
Leave /etc/localtime as UTC and use the make sure that the TZ environment variable is always kept in sync for libc compatibility. Now your "ls -l" shows your current preferred time zone.

(I think it's essentially a bug in coreutils that it's trivial to dynamically update the "system-wide" local time by replacing /etc/localtime and have it effective immediately, yet nontrivial to update the user's environment from, say, TZ=Europe/London to TZ=Europe/Copenhagen. But who am I to criticise software designs that are older than myself?)