Bug#1051973: tzdata: no warning about moving US/* to tzdata-legacy

[Mike Kupfer]

Package: tzdata
Version: 2023c-10
Severity: important
X-Debbugs-Cc: kup...@rawbw.com

Dear Maintainer,

After using synaptic or apt to upgrade tzdata from 2023c-7 to
2023c-10, I would get the wrong time in my desktop environments and on
a virtual terminal (no X). I would get UTC, rather than my local
time. Though the lightdm screen would display the correct time.

I tracked this down to the fix for #1040997. So, changing TZ from
US/Pacific to America/Los_Angeles makes the problem go away. Or,
keeping TZ at US/Pacific, installing tzdata-legacy makes the problem
go away.

I'm okay with the change itself, but it really should get more
visibility. That is, on upgrade the user should get some sort of
heads-up that they are getting an incompatible change and may need to
take corrective action.

thanks,
mike

-- System Information:
Debian Release: trixie/sid
APT prefers testing-debug
APT policy: (500, 'testing-debug'), (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 6.4.0-3-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU threads; PREEMPT)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_OOT_MODULE, TAINT_UNSIGNED_MODULE
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages tzdata depends on:
ii debconf [debconf-2.0] 1.5.82

tzdata recommends no packages.

tzdata suggests no packages.

-- debconf information:
tzdata/Zones/Pacific:
tzdata/Zones/Africa:
tzdata/Zones/Europe:
tzdata/Zones/Arctic:
* tzdata/Zones/America: Los_Angeles
* tzdata/Areas: America
* tzdata/Zones/Etc: UTC
tzdata/Zones/Australia:
tzdata/Zones/Antarctica:
tzdata/Zones/US:
tzdata/Zones/Indian:
tzdata/Zones/Atlantic:
tzdata/Zones/SystemV:
tzdata/Zones/Asia:

[Mike Kupfer]

Mike Kupfer wrote:

> I'm okay with the change itself, but it really should get more
> visibility. That is, on upgrade the user should get some sort of
> heads-up that they are getting an incompatible change and may need to
> take corrective action.

To clarify, what I have in mind is a news entry, which apt-listchanges
would display. (I'm not really familiar with Debian packaging, so I
couldn't describe the mechanism when I filed the bug last night. I
guess what I'm requesting is a NEWS.Debian entry.)

thanks,
mike

[Steev Klimaszewski]

Hello!

This also affects Postgresql Updates as the timezone is written to the
configuration file, so for example Debian testing recently upgraded
from postgresql-15 to postgresql-16 and if you attempt to follow the
instructions in /usr/share/doc/postgresql-common/README.Debian.gz you
end up getting an error message about the configuration being
incorrect (it's written in 2 places in the configuration file) if the
timezone was set to one of the now removed timezones.

-- steev

[Jonathan Kamens]

+1 on creating a NEWS entry for this. It just bit me and took over an hour for me to figure out how to fix.