On Mar 27, 2005 10:02 AM, Alexander Dalloz <ad+lists(a)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