Re: New clock applet for 2.22

["Matthias Clasen" <matthias clasen gmail com>]

On 9/25/07, David Zeuthen <david fubar dk> wrote:
>
> 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.
>

Sounds like a pretty reasonable compromise to me.