Comment # 3 on bug 1172521 from Marketa Calabkova

(In reply to Thorsten Kukuk from comment #0)
> %post
> if [ ! -L /usr/share/zoneinfo/posixrules ]; then
>    rm -f /usr/share/zoneinfo/posixrules
>    ln -sf /etc/localtime /usr/share/zoneinfo/posixrules
> fi
> if [ -e /usr/share/zoneinfo/posixrules.rpmnew ]; then
>    rm -f /usr/share/zoneinfo/posixrules.rpmnew
> fi

from changelog 2016g:

"""
  * The following change was previously patched in the package
    and is now upstream:
    + If the installed localtime and/or posixrules files are
      symbolic links, zic now keeps them symbolic links when
      updating them, for compatibility with platforms like
      openSUSE where other programs configure these files as
      symlinks.
    + zic now avoids hard linking to symbolic links, avoids
      some unnecessary mkdir and stat system calls, and uses
      shorter file names internally.
    + Drop the patches:
      ...
"""
Maybe the changes were part of the fix, but they were forgotten? Just a guess.

> With read-only root filesystems and transactional-updates, this is a bad
> idea.

What exactly is a bad idea, please?

> Since this is pretty old code looking like some update cleanup, I question
> if we need that at all or couldn't remove it completely.

"pretty old"? How old? Could you please point me to an exact revision? AFAIK
there is no "osc blame", so I can not find it myself.