Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 66655
dateconfig mangles timezone files when switching timezones
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:43:08 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.1a) Gecko/20020610 Description of problem: When using dateconfig to set the timezone from America/Los_Angeles to America/New_York, America/Los_Angles is overwritten by America/New_York. This may occur in other instances. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. back up Los_Angles and New_York in /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/ 2. run dateconfig and change timezone from Los_Angeles to New_York 3. diff Los_Angeles and the backup, they are different 4. diff Los_Angeles and New_York, they are the same. 5. run dateconfig and change timezone from New_York to Los_Angeles 6. file Los_Angeles, it is now zero length 7. run date, the system clock now reports UTC Actual Results: [root@alexandria America]# date Wed Jun 12 20:50:59 PDT 2002 [root@alexandria America]# dateconfig Shutting down ntpd: [FAILED] [root@alexandria America]# diff Los_Angeles Los_Angeles.BAK Binary files Los_Angeles and Los_Angeles.BAK differ [root@alexandria America]# diff Los_Angeles New_York [root@alexandria America]# dateconfig Shutting down ntpd: [FAILED] [root@alexandria America]# file Los_Angeles Los_Angeles: empty [root@alexandria America]# date Thu Jun 13 03:52:22 UTC 2002 [root@alexandria America]# Expected Results: timezone should be set correctly with no change to timezone files Additional info: It appears that whatever timezone the machine booted in is the one that gets mangled, and that this is not just between America/Los_Angeles and America/New_York, but I have not extensively tested further than this.
I cannot reproduce this behavior. dateconfig never opens any files in /usr/share/zoneinfo for writing. As you can see from /usr/share/dateconfig/timezoneBackend.py: def writeConfig (self, timezoneData): self.tz, self.utc, self.arc = timezoneData instPath = "" fromFile = "/usr/share/zoneinfo/" + self.tz try: self.copyFile(fromFile, instPath + "/etc/localtime") except OSError, (errno, msg): print (_("Error copying timezone (from %s): %s") % (fromFile, msg)) So we copy the correct timezone file from /usr/share/zoneinfo to /etc/localtime, but no modification of any files in /usr/share/zoneinfo takes place. I don't know how to explain the behavior that you're seeing.
my /etc/localtime has become a link pointing back to /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Los_Angeles. dateconfig does not handle this properly. The link was created by /usr/bin/kcmshell 'clock' when I used it to change the timezone earlier.
Oh I see. I will have to fix this.
Ok, I've committed a fix for this in CVS. dateconfig wasn't expecting /etc/localtime to be a symbolic link, but dateconfig now removes /etc/localtime and then makes a new symbolic link from /etc/localtime to /usr/share/zoneinfo/$foo A new version should appear in Rawhide soon. However, dateconfig has been ported to gtk2, so there will be a lot of new packages you'll need. Look for dateconfig-1.0.3-1.i386.rpm
*** Bug 79429 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Is a 7.3 compatible release available?
Created attachment 108670 [details] Fix deletion of /usr/share/zoneinfo files This patch fixed the problem on my system.