Setting TZDIR (was Re: A single reference to installed non-binaries)

[Edouard Klein <edou@rdklein.fr>]

Leo Famulari writes:

> On Tue, Aug 17, 2021 at 04:01:15PM +0200, Edouard Klein wrote:
>> See e.g.
>> https://gitlab.com/edouardklein/guix/-/blob/beaverlabs/beaver/packages/scheme-xyz.scm#L68
>> 
>> Here, xlsxio and tzdir will be expanded to their full install path in
>> the store.
>
> I'm going off-topic, but you should not patch TZDIR like this.

I appreciate you going off-topic to warn me about a mistake ! Thanks :)

>
> The time zone database should be found dynamically at run-time via an
> environment variable set by the system. Otherwise, your built package
> will eventually "go stale" as the time zone database is updated, which
> happens several times per year.
>
> Does that make sense?

It does, thanks, but I'm in a bit of a pickle there because this
packagge needs, for reasons outside of my control, to be deployable on
a multitude of host (non-GuixSD) linux distributions, and as a docker
container. In those cases, I can't expect the timezone data to be up to
date or to be there at all.

Even if I list tzdata as a dependency, the host system's TZDIR will not
point to it.

I understand that if I regularly guix pull and guix package -u, then the
tzdata package will be kept up to date. Is that correct ?

If it is, then I need to rebuild the .tar.gz and the docker image every
so often, and this problem would be solved for the foreing distros as well.

Thanks for alerting me about this !

Cheers,

Edouard.