Subject: bug#36870: was: date bug -- really locale bug or ??

From: Mark H Weaver <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 06 Aug 2019 02:54:03 -0400

Hi Bengt,

I'm sorry that I didn't have time to fully read your messages, but if I
understand correctly from my quick skimming, the 'date' command from
Guix is failing to access the zoneinfo.  I think I see your problem.

Bengt Richter <[email-masked]> writes:
> $ strace -y date|& egrep 'America|^write'|sed -e 's:,:,\n    :g'
> openat(AT_FDCWD,
>      "/gnu/store/h90vnqw0nwd0hhm1l5dgxsdrigddfmq4-glibc-2.28/share/zoneinfo/America/Los_Angeles",
>      O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)

The file name above suggests that your TZDIR variable is not set
correctly to allow Guix-built binaries to find the zoneinfo files.

On Guix systems, /etc/environment includes an entry that sets TZDIR to
the equivalent of "$(guix build tzdata)/share/zoneinfo".

When using Guix on top of another distro, an alternative choice might be
to set TZDIR to "/usr/share/zoneinfo".  I'm not sure which setting is
preferable on non-Guix systems.

Can you try setting TZDIR and see if that solves the problem for you?

     Regards,
       Mark