Keeping /etc/localtime up-to-date

[David Wolfskill]

On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 01:31:22PM -0700, Doug Barton wrote:
> On 03/27/2011 08:38, David Wolfskill wrote:
> >It would (in principle) be possible to teach mergemaster(8) how to
> >do this (possibly by including a cookie in ~/.mergemasterrc or
> >/etc/mergemaster.rc to tell it what the "reference" zoneinfo pathname
> >is), but this type of approach seems sufficiently different from
> >(the bulk of?) what mergemaster does currently that I'm unconvinced
> >that this is reasonable, let alone ideal.
> 
> Yeah, I wouldn't be enthusiastic about this. :)

Indeed.

> >So it seems to me that requirements would be:
> >* The content of /etc/localtime must provide the appropriate
> >   "zoneinfo" information, even when/usr/share/zoneinfo/* has been
> >   modified (or shortly thereafter, in concert with "make installworld").
> 
> This is more along the lines of something that would be easy to work 
> with in mergemaster.

Hmm... OK....

> If I can tell what file in /usr/share/zoneinfo to 
> compare /etc/localtime to (ideally with fully path), I'm happy to 
> provide a mechanism in mergemaster to make sure it stays up to date.

Well, that's the function that the (hypothetical) "cookie" in
~/.mergemasterrc or /etc/mergemaster.rc was intended to to provide.
It could be a simple shell variable, for example.

There are other ways to do it, of course -- e.g., the first time the
utility is run, it could actually ask, but then cache the information in
some place so it could look there first (and if it finds a cached
answer, avoid asking again unless it's told to ignore the cache -- as
might be reasonable if the machine is moved to a different time zone.

But I tend to favor simplicity.  :-)

Peace,
david
-- 
David H. Wolfskill				david at catwhisker.org
Depriving a girl or boy of an opportunity for education is evil.

See http://www.catwhisker.org/~david/publickey.gpg for my public key.
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