Subject: Re: bug#68411: Timezone not detected from /etc/localtime

From: Distopico <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2024 10:00:36 -0500

On 2024-01-18, Maxim Cournoyer <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Distopico <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>> Apps such as Icecat or ungoogled-chromium are not able to get the
>> correct timezone from /etc/localtime when `/etc/localtime` is a realpath
>> maybe because it expect /etc/share/zoneinfo, with readlink partially
>> works fine some apps, maybe related with an icu bug.[1]
>
> I don't know about ungoogled-chromium, but for IceCat, I had
> investigated the problem at length in https://issues.guix.gnu.org/59368,
> and it seems the bug is not in ICU but in Firefox, triggered in very
> specific situations (resistFingerprinting defaults to true before user
> prefs are loaded, and resetting the timezone fails in some javascript
> that expects /etc/localtime to be a symlink, see:
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1817004#c8).

But in icecat there is tow issues, one is related with the
/etc/localtime that expect a symlink but also there is another one
related with firefox sandbox, you can see here that  `/usr` and `/nix`
was added to a whitelist, those paths is where they expect have the
zoneinfo files and `/gnu` is not in that whitelist (I already reported
to firefox), and disabling `MOZ_DISABLE_CONTENT_SANDBOX=1` it and with
the symlink the timezone works again.