[systemd-devel] [systemd-commits] Makefile.am src/shared src/timedate

[Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek]

On Tue, Mar 24, 2015 at 03:32:31PM +0100, Kay Sievers wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 24, 2015 at 3:24 PM, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek
> <zbyszek at in.waw.pl> wrote:
> > On Tue, Mar 24, 2015 at 07:04:11AM -0700, Kay Sievers wrote:
> >>  Makefile.am                |    2
> >>  src/shared/time-dst.c      |  329 ---------------------------------------------
> >>  src/shared/time-dst.h      |   26 ---
> >>  src/timedate/timedatectl.c |   56 -------
> >>  4 files changed, 413 deletions(-)
> >>
> >> New commits:
> >> commit 16c6ea29348ddac73998f339166f863bee0dfef6
> >> Author: Kay Sievers <kay at vrfy.org>
> >> Date:   Tue Mar 24 13:52:04 2015 +0100
> >>
> >>     timedate: remove daylight saving time handling and tzfile parser
> >>
> >>     We planned to support (the conceptually broken) daylight saving
> >>     time/local time features in the kernel, SCSI, networking, FAT
> >>     filesystem, but it turned out to be a race we cannot win and do
> >>     not want to get involved. Systemd should not fiddle with daylight
> >>     saving time or parse timezone information itself.
> >>
> >>     Leave everything to glibc or tools like date(1) and do not make any
> >>     promises or raise expectations that systemd should handle anything
> >>     like this.
> >
> > That just doesn't make sense. This was *extremely* useful functionality.
> 
> Sure, it was useful, it was still not the right place to solve it.
> With the decision not to support any DST stuff in systemd itself, DST
> parsing did not belong here. Maybe in date(1) or any other tool.

But we cannot pretend timezones don't exists. timedatectl *is* a
high-level tool — the whole point of it's existence was to provide a
nice wrapper around the dbus api to set the timezone. The fact that it
could be used to set timezones and query it in an easy way made it
worthwhile. I don't see anything wrong with the fact that a tool
which allows setting the system timezone also allows displaying some
useful details about the time and timezone. There was nothing wrong
with this functionality in general, only a small issue with conversion
of remote-to-local, which we should work out instead of throwing out
the baby with the bathwater.

> Systemd's job is not to cover exotic features missing in other tools.
> It was removed to stop misguiding people that systemd should to
> provide any of these things on the bus or in its APIs, just because it
> could provide it. In the longer-term this would just end up in a
> half-baked mess, which we need to make sure will not happen.

Zbyszek