Bug 1722233

Summary:	tzdata: Allow complete removal of tzdata.
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Patsy Griffin <pfrankli>
Component:	tzdata	Assignee:	Patsy Griffin <pfrankli>
Status:	ASSIGNED ---	QA Contact:	Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity:	unspecified	Docs Contact:
Priority:	unspecified
Version:	rawhide	CC:	clems.verna, codonell, dridi.boukelmoune, fedoraproject, mhofmann, pbrobinson, pfrankli, skrenger, yaneti
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Bug Blocks:	1269538, 1734342, 1402934

Description Patsy Griffin 2019-06-19 18:27:51 UTC

Description of problem:
Not-compressed tzdata takes a considerable amount of storage(du -hc -> 7.4M). Would it be possible to split it into two subpackages, UTC and the rest? Many container deployments would benefit from the ability to install just UTC.

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Comment 1 Ben Cotton 2019-08-13 16:50:18 UTC

This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 31 development cycle.
Changing version to '31'.

Comment 2 Ben Cotton 2019-08-13 19:09:56 UTC

This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 31 development cycle.
Changing version to 31.

Comment 3 Patsy Griffin 2020-05-12 02:31:14 UTC

*** Bug 1733452 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4 Carlos O'Donell 2021-02-17 14:33:35 UTC

I've been discussing this with Patsy and in general we discussed the following steps:

- Identify critical minimum tzdata install to boot a system in UTC time.
- Split up package such that we can have UTC-only containers.
- Default Fedora install should have all of tzdata.
- Default fedora-minimal containers should be able to get to just UTC tzdata installed e.g. tzdata-minimal.
- The glibc team needs to verify and fix glibc TZ fallout which always prints the setup TZ env var name and do something more intelligent.

Comment 5 Carlos O'Donell 2022-02-14 20:58:04 UTC

This was taken upstream and rejected. Instead the simpler plan is going to be:

- Allow complete tzdata removal.
- Loosen dep in glibc.
- Test anaconda can still install systems with tzdata by default.
- Test container image can be built without tzdata.
- The glibc team needs to verify and fix glibc TZ fallout which always prints the setup TZ env var name and do something more intelligent.

Comment 6 Carlos O'Donell 2023-07-04 13:34:27 UTC

The tzdata removal plan has run into an issue with Python.

In the case of Python the upstream sources do not work when requesting UTC zone if tzdata is not present for the UTC zone.

This means we are back to a Tzdata Minimal setup that would allow packages to require minimal tzdata to operate correctly.

We will continue to discuss this in Fedora Devel to get consensus for the original change which was Tzdata Minimal:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/tzdata-minimal

Comment 7 Carlos O'Donell 2023-07-25 13:15:43 UTC

This change has been accepted for Fedora 39:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/AllowRemovalOfTzdata

Comment 8 Carlos O'Donell 2023-08-01 13:38:29 UTC

glibc no longer requires tzdata to be installed, which starts allowing a minimal system be without tzdata.

gcc removal would be next, but libstdc++ may require it for the testsuite and that needs review.

Comment 9 Carlos O'Donell 2023-08-08 13:43:41 UTC

Patsy submitted a gcc PR for this:
https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/gcc/pull-request/43