Timezone problems

Timezone problems

[Alex Sassmannshausen]

Hello all,

I'm running into issues whereby the 'date' command that is part of the
coreutils package (installed through guix) returns non-timezone
corrected values (i.e. it returns UTC even for local time).

I suspect this was to do with the locale complications of the earlier
gcc version that was part of guix, and that locale issue seems to be
resolved now: Guile 2.0.9 compiled with the new gcc does not complain
about locale settings anymore.

Would guix normally have recompiled coreutils following the gcc upgrade
too? If so then the problem must be something else — but the date
program invoked through /bin/date returns the correct local time (installed
through aptitude), so it seems guix specific.

If not — is there a way to force re-installation from scratch for just
coreutils?

Best wishes,

Alex

Re: Timezone problems

[Ludovic Courtès]

Alex Sassmannshausen <alex.sassmannshausen@gmail.com> skribis:

> I'm running into issues whereby the 'date' command that is part of the
> coreutils package (installed through guix) returns non-timezone
> corrected values (i.e. it returns UTC even for local time).

Actually you first need to install the ‘tzdata’ package (which I just
added yesterday!).  Then you must set the TZDIR environment variable to
point to it, like this:

  export TZDIR=$HOME/.guix-profile/share/zoneinfo

The C library (the one from Guix) will then get timezone info from there.

> I suspect this was to do with the locale complications of the earlier
> gcc version that was part of guix, and that locale issue seems to be
> resolved now: Guile 2.0.9 compiled with the new gcc does not complain
> about locale settings anymore.

This is actually unrelated but yes, this one’s fixed too.

> Would guix normally have recompiled coreutils following the gcc upgrade
> too? If so then the problem must be something else — but the date
> program invoked through /bin/date returns the correct local time (installed
> through aptitude), so it seems guix specific.
>
> If not — is there a way to force re-installation from scratch for just
> coreutils?

What matters most is what’s in your profile.  I just run ‘guix package --upgrade’,
which atomically upgrades everything that’s installed in your profile
(so you get the new Coreutils, and everything linked against the new libc.)

HTH!

Ludo’.

Re: Timezone problems

[Alex Sassmannshausen]

Hi

> Actually you first need to install the ‘tzdata’ package (which I just
> added yesterday!).  Then you must set the TZDIR environment variable to
> point to it, like this:
>
>   export TZDIR=$HOME/.guix-profile/share/zoneinfo
>
> The C library (the one from Guix) will then get timezone info from there.


Fabulous! That seems to have done the trick. 

Congrats on the release of 0.2.

Best wishes,

Alex