Re: New clock applet for 2.22

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Tue, 2007-09-25 at 17:42 -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> We just figured out how to do per-session timezones at the glibc level:

(I wonder if this is GNU specific? man tzset suggests POSIX.)

> you can set
> 
> TZ=:/home/alex/.localtime
> 
> in the session environment, and then update the symlink ~/.localtime to
> point to whatever the current timezone is.

This is somewhat a can of worms; many people, especially our current
class of users (e.g. free software enthusiasts) and those using GNOME
for administering a server, would expect that the system timezone is
changed when the click on the intlclock applet. 

(Of course we can always use an annoying nonsense dialog like "Do you
want to change the timezone for all users or just yourself?" but I don't
think that is a reasonable idea.)

So I think that we should continue to change the system timezone unless
TZ actually points to a writable file for the session user. In that case
we update the file instead of /etc/localtime. Then it's going to work
fine for the thin-client case where some admin have already set up
~/.localtime and TZ accordingly.

The alternative, making gnome-session set TZ=~/.localtime on session
start (and if ~/.localtime does not exist then make a symlink
to /etc/localtime) just sounds like scary change that will piss off a
lot of existing users. Shrug.

      David