I don't think this feature would belong in datetime, mainly because the system should be able to set its own time with NTP.

Kinda related, kinda not.

However, I would like to see the ability to add an offset to the display. I have my system time set to UTC and TZ in .bashrc for the local timezone but xfce4-datetime-plugin can only see the system time when it is started.

What do you think?

Comment 3 Landry Breuil 2013-02-14 21:04:02 CET

Very likely wontfix - it's a complicated task to set date/time in a portable way on all systems where Xfce runs.

(In reply to comment #3)
> Very likely wontfix - it's a complicated task to set date/time in a portable
> way on all systems where Xfce runs.

This sounds unreasonable. How many non-POSIX systems does XFCE run in? You can always fallback to running date(1) command on POSIX-compliant ones.

Comment 5 Landry Breuil 2013-02-14 21:34:11 CET

(In reply to comment #4)
> (In reply to comment #3)
> > Very likely wontfix - it's a complicated task to set date/time in a portable
> > way on all systems where Xfce runs.
> 
> This sounds unreasonable. How many non-POSIX systems does XFCE run in? You
> can always fallback to running date(1) command on POSIX-compliant ones.

Provide a patch then.

'Only the superuser may change the date.' sayz the manpage on my system.

(In reply to comment #5)
> Provide a patch then.

I currently don't have enough time to make full patch with all GUI changes etc.

> 
> 'Only the superuser may change the date.' sayz the manpage on my system.

Nothing prevents a program to use gksudo.
This might look as simple as this:

{
 char* date=getNewDateString();
 const char* cmd="gksudo date -s \"%s\"";
 char* command=malloc(strlen(date)+strlen(cmd));
 sprintf(command,cmd,date);
 int ret=system(command);
 free(date);
 free(command);
 if(ret!=-1)
  success();
 else
  error();
}

Comment 7 Landry Breuil 2013-02-14 22:17:39 CET

(In reply to comment #6)
> (In reply to comment #5)

> > 'Only the superuser may change the date.' sayz the manpage on my system.
> 
> Nothing prevents a program to use gksudo.

gksudo is not portable either.. what if you need to enter a password ? what if you want to use a yubikey to auth ?

what if on your system policykit is the only way to run things as root ?
Or if you're on linux and systemd is the preferred way to set the date ?