Menu
▾
▴
#2926 Latest flight gear update on Ubuntu Focal clobbers system Timezone files
The latest flight gear update on Ubuntu Focal 1:2020.3.13-0ubuntu1~ppa2~20.04.1 incorrectly clobbers the main system /usr/share/zoneinfo from tzdata and with incorrect timezone information.
Also, the timezones in the data from the flightgear install incorrectly have the US DST rules still on pre-2005 values. Yesterday, which was Sunday October 27, 2024, it decided to switch from daylight time to standard time. That would have been true prior to 2005 when it was the last Sunday in October, but it's now the first Sunday in November.
It took me all day to try and figure out why my computer suddenly couldn't keep time anymore and why the checksums on my /etc/localtime file didn't match any file from the official tzdata package as it should.
At the moment, I have a tangled mess of flightgear package and tzdata package. It looks like /usr/share/games/flightgear/Timezone is just a symlink to ../../zoneinfo, causing it to overwrite the system /usr/share/zoneinfo. If I were to uninstall flightgear, it would most likely destroy the system timezone information and break it completely without doing a force reinstall of tzdata.
I can probably untangle it by changing that symlink to a real folder and putting the (now overwritten) system zoneinfo content there and force reinstalling the real tzdata package. But man, what a mess!
This needs to get fixed ASAP and correctly. It should NOT be overwriting files from another system package!
Hi Donna,
Unfortunately we don't maintain the Ubunut PPA - I shall try to find out who does, and report this bug to them, but it's nothing we can fix ourselves.