emilylange
2fb95a568c
This is essentially a revert ofe8a805af10in favor of a proper fix because unlike first assumed, this affects not just systemd internally, but virtually any program that uses icu::TimeZone to read the system's time zone. And while we could patch icu, I believe this will take far too long and we arguably don't know who else depends on the same assumption icu made. All I know is every chromium-based browser[^0], including electron, calls icu::TimeZone::detectHostTimeZone(), which returns the special time zone Etc/Unknown instead of the configured one when using timedated, either directly via timedatectl set-timezone or via D-Bus. The reason for this is icu::TimeZone assumes[^1] every valid /etc/localtime symlink includes /zoneinfo/ before the zoneinfo (olson) timezone id. This is a pretty decent guess and also applied to NixOS since ever, up until we bumped systemd to v258 in1c5d47dd78, which included an upstream change that made the symlink relative. The issue is, a relative /etc/localtime symlink in other distros results in e.g. ../usr/share/zoneinfo/UTC, not zoneinfo/UTC. For NixOS, however, we patch systemd to use /etc/zoneinfo instead of /usr/share/zoneinfo. zoneinfo/UTC breaks the assumption icu::TimeZone makes, because zoneinfo/ is not /zoneinfo/. We could try to trick it by needlessly making the relative symlink ./zoneinfo/ instead, but this is both more fragile and makes the patch significantly larger. And as stated above already, we simply don't know who else makes similar assumptions. So to fix this for good, we force the symlink to be absolute, just like we had it prior to systemd v258. Note that we could also simply unconditionally set ~~~nix { systemd.services."systemd-timedated".environment.SYSTEMD_ETC_LOCALTIME = "/etc/localtime"; } ~~~ to make the symlink absolute. But I'd argue this would cause this edge-case to slowly slide into obscurity, almost asking for it to resurface in the future eventually. [0]: https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/refs/tags/146.0.7680.177:services/device/time_zone_monitor/time_zone_monitor.cc;l=57-59;bpv=0 [1]: https://github.com/unicode-org/icu/blob/release-78.3/icu4c/source/common/putil.cpp#L686-L695
Nixpkgs is a collection of over 120,000 software packages that can be installed with the Nix package manager. It also implements NixOS, a purely-functional Linux distribution.
Manuals
- NixOS Manual - how to install, configure, and maintain a purely-functional Linux distribution
- Nixpkgs Manual - contributing to Nixpkgs and using programming-language-specific Nix expressions
- Nix Package Manager Manual - how to write Nix expressions (programs), and how to use Nix command line tools
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Nixpkgs and NixOS are built and tested by our continuous integration system, Hydra.
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Artifacts successfully built with Hydra are published to cache at https://cache.nixos.org/. When successful build and test criteria are met, the Nixpkgs expressions are distributed via Nix channels.
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Nixpkgs is among the most active projects on GitHub. While thousands of open issues and pull requests might seem like a lot at first, it helps to consider it in the context of the scope of the project. Nixpkgs describes how to build tens of thousands of pieces of software and implements a Linux distribution. The GitHub Insights page gives a sense of the project activity.
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Nixpkgs is licensed under the MIT License.
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MIT license does not apply to the packages built by Nixpkgs, merely to the files in this repository (the Nix expressions, build scripts, NixOS modules, etc.). It also might not apply to patches included in Nixpkgs, which may be derivative works of the packages to which they apply. The aforementioned artifacts are all covered by the licenses of the respective packages.