[Bug 1227520] Re: Timezone changes are not working due to ro /etc and bind mounts

[Stéphane Graber]

So I think your best bet here is to change those daemons to fallback to in-place file content changes when atomic edits fail because of writable fs.
If /etc/localtime is already a symlink in the rootfs, you should be able to change its target without much trouble too.

Switching those files to be symlinks in the base rootfs is a bad idea
which we initially considered. It's bad because we then have no way to
get the original value of those, so we'd need something to create the
target with a sensible content at boot time, which isn't terribly
optimal. Also symlinks have a tendency to confuse some stat checks in
various piece of software (probably not a big concern for
timezone/localtime though).

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1227520

Title:
  Timezone changes are not working due to ro /etc and bind mounts

Status in “systemd” package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed
Status in “ubuntu-system-settings” package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  There is no way to set up a different timezone than automatic in the
  System Settings

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 13.10
  Package: ubuntu-system-settings 0.1+13.10.20130910.3-0ubuntu1
  Uname: Linux 3.4.0-3-mako armv7l
  ApportVersion: 2.12.2-0ubuntu1
  Architecture: armhf
  Date: Thu Sep 19 08:41:07 2013
  InstallationDate: Installed on 2013-09-18 (0 days ago)
  InstallationMedia: Ubuntu Saucy Salamander (development branch) - armhf (20130918)
  MarkForUpload: True
  ProcEnviron:
   TERM=linux
   PATH=(custom, no user)
  SourcePackage: ubuntu-system-settings
  UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

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