RHEL Engineering is moving the tracking of its product development work on RHEL 6 through RHEL 9 to Red Hat Jira (issues.redhat.com). If you're a Red Hat customer, please continue to file support cases via the Red Hat customer portal. If you're not, please head to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira and file new tickets here. Individual Bugzilla bugs in the statuses "NEW", "ASSIGNED", and "POST" are being migrated throughout September 2023. Bugs of Red Hat partners with an assigned Engineering Partner Manager (EPM) are migrated in late September as per pre-agreed dates. Bugs against components "kernel", "kernel-rt", and "kpatch" are only migrated if still in "NEW" or "ASSIGNED". If you cannot log in to RH Jira, please consult article #7032570. That failing, please send an e-mail to the RH Jira admins at rh-issues@redhat.com to troubleshoot your issue as a user management inquiry. The email creates a ServiceNow ticket with Red Hat. Individual Bugzilla bugs that are migrated will be moved to status "CLOSED", resolution "MIGRATED", and set with "MigratedToJIRA" in "Keywords". The link to the successor Jira issue will be found under "Links", have a little "two-footprint" icon next to it, and direct you to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira (issue links are of type "https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-XXXX", where "X" is a digit). This same link will be available in a blue banner at the top of the page informing you that that bug has been migrated.

To fix bug 1200555, we need to change the /etc/localtime update mechanism not to touch /etc/localtime if it s a symbolic link.  This is difficult to implement within the existing statically-linked /usr/sbin/tzdata-update program.

With RHEL 6 RPM, it is possible to implement /etc/localtime updates with Lua interpreter built into RPM, including the symbolic link check.  This means that the dependency issue which previously stopped us to include the /etc/localtime management in the tzdata package do not apply anymore, and we can perform the update in a %post scriptlet written in Lua.

We need tzdata packages with this change for testing the fix for bug 1200555, but there is no need to actually release these packages at the same time the fix for bug 1200555 goes out.  The reason is that /etc/localtime needs to be updated only at tzdata update time.