On 1/17/23 00:31, Robert Elz wrote:
the more common usage would seem to be when installing a system, where nothing can be assumed about the system's clock at all
My impression is that during installation most systems nowadays get UTC from NTP, and do not ask the user for the current time. By the time these installations ask for a timezone, UTC is already known. It's been many years since an install asked me for the current time. No doubt things work differently on non-networked installations, but increasingly these are done only in specialized environments where installers are assumed to be somewhat expert anyway, so I'm not as worried about them.
So I'd suggest (if this method is to be retained) that it come with a warning that it only be used if the system's UTC clock is already correctly set, which I do not know of any way to verify that can be expected to work during system installation (no network yet operating).
Yes, I don't know any way either. Thanks for the suggestion. tzselect already warns to some extent, as it asks you to confirm both local time and UTC. However, tzselect can do better by rewording its earlier questions so that it asks for the relation between local time and UTC, not for the current local time. That way, even if the platform's UTC clock is wrong the questions and answers still make sense. I installed the attached proposed patch to try to do that.