How does the time zone info get updated?

[Stefan Esser]

Am 05.01.21 um 23:30 schrieb Andriy Gapon:
> On 2021-01-06 00:21, Stefan Esser wrote:
>> Am 05.01.21 um 21:36 schrieb Warner Losh:
>>> On Tue, Jan 5, 2021 at 12:51 PM Stefan Esser <se at freebsd.org
>>> <mailto:se at freebsd.org>> wrote:
>> [...]
>>>      Yes, if only the leap-seconds are required, this helps get the time
>>>      synchronized - but is quite different from timezone file updates.
>>>
>>>       > So no TZ update outside an os upgrade, but the leap seconds file
>>>      updates
>>>       > at the speed of NIST...
>>>
>>>      The OP did not ask for leap-second updates but for timezone files,
>>>      if I understand his mail correctly.
>>>
>>> Yes. But I know him from another list I'm on and knew the back story.
>>> How does FreeBSD know about leap seconds and what mechanism does it
>>> use to keep up to date was the topic there.
>>
>> Well, then you answered the question sent to the other list,
>> which I have not seen and did not know about this context ...
>>
>> But Ed Maste has meanwhile answered the question he asked on
>> this list (as far as I understand it):
>>
>> -> "freebsd-update" applies the timezone changes and EN notes
>> are sent out to notify users of the availability of this update.
>>
>> And release users should follow-up on EN notes anyway and thus
>> should not miss the timezone updates.
> 
> Also, another option (at least for me) is to replace timezone files from
> base with those from tzdata package.  Port / package updates are more
> flexible / frequent.

I had looked for a port but had not found it at first.

It is misc/zoneinfo and the zoneinfo package.

But this port is special since it installs files outside $PREFIX
and requires WITHOUT_ZONEINFO=yes to be defined in src.conf.

I'd rather think we should have the port install files into
$PREFIX/share/zoneinfo and modify the file lookup to search at
that location first, before falling back to the base system
location.

This might require changes to zic, zdump, tzsetup, etcupdate,
and bsdconfig, which only expect a single path in TZDIR.

This might be considered worse than the port that overwrites
files in base.

In case that the alternate location for the port provided files
is considered, I'd be willing to prepare patches for review
that add the additional lookup in LOCALBASE.

Regards, STefan

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