Timezone

Deron Meranda deron.meranda at gmail.com
Wed Apr 6 02:55:53 UTC 2005


On Mar 27, 2005 10:02 AM, Alexander Dalloz <ad+lists at uni-x.org> wrote:
> Am So, den 27.03.2005 schrieb Jens Ruda um 15:49:
> > My server (Fedora Core 3) need to use UTC, but I can't select UTC in
> > Timezone Selection (system-config-date). In Fedora Core 1 UTC exist in the
> > timezone list, but not in FC3. Why?
> 
> On FC2 this choice exist too in the GUI tool. Have no FC3 with X to
> check that there. You may edit the configuration file manually:
> 
> $ cat /etc/sysconfig/clock
> ZONE="Europe/Berlin"

The actual UTC timezone is called "Etc/UTC" (this is specified in the
tzdata-2005f package sources).  Of course there may be many timezones
that are functionally equivalent to each other.  (There are also other
alias names such as "UTC" and "Etc/Universal"; but "Etc/UTC" is the
canonical one).

The reason it's not showing up in the system-config-date is that the
GUI gets the list of zones  to show from the
/usr/share/zoneinfo/zone.tab, which lists only some of the timezones,
along with latitude/longitude coordinates of that zone's
representative city (e.g., New York City for the America/New_York
zone).  The Etc/UTC zone has no single latitude, and thus no
representative city (Greenwich is for GMT, not UTC); so it's not in
the zone.tab.  And that means it is omitted from the GUI list.

It's arguable that system-config-date should forcibly always include
Etc/UTC in it's list even though it's not in the zone.tab
file....maybe you can file a bugzilla bug requesting that?  Perhaps a
comment from the tzdata sources explains why Etc/UTC may be considered
unimportant,

   # These entries [Etc/*] are mostly present for historical reasons, so that
   # people in areas not otherwise covered by the tz files could "zic -l"
   # to a time zone that was right for their area.  These days, the
   # tz files cover almost all the inhabited world, so there's little
   # need now for the entries that are not on UTC.

But it you read carefully it says all Etc/*, except Etc/UTC, are probably
not needed.  So I think it makes sense that Etc/UTC itself should be
included in the GUI.  But since it has no single geographical point, it
would make the map handling a little complex.

Remember, there's nothing keeping you from putting whatever zone you
want into your /etc/sysconfig/clock file as the ZONE="..." variable.
-- 
Deron Meranda




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