Section 7a - Timezone states that to set the timezone you should use # ls /usr/share/zoneinfo (Suppose you want to use GMT) # cp /usr/share/zoneinfo/GMT /etc/localtime Surely this is wrong. The correct method would be: # ls /usr/share/zoneinfo (Suppose you want to use GMT) # ls -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/GMT /etc/localtime The use of a symlink here is important: timezone information in /usr/share/zoneinfo can and will get updated (for example, the information for Australia/NSW changed at least twice last year as legislators moved the start of daylight savings for the Commonwealth Games). If there is a copy of the file at /etc/localtime any updates in /usr/share/zoneinfo will not take effect causing problems when daylight savings changes.
True, but the downside of linking, is that we've had users with seperate /usr partitions and if the partition fails to mount for some reason, we would have wrong timestamps all over the place when the system comes up or tries to. Look at http://sources.gentoo.org/, we've had ln -sf before and then changed to cp for the above reasons. As far as I can see, we're not going to be making this change.
Reopening for a proper resolution
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 127899 ***
*** Bug 389091 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
