[Bug] - `/etc/localtime` is not a symlink

[nwalters512]

Describe the bug

/etc/localtime is supposed to be a symlink: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/localtime.html. This is the most important part of those docs:

Because the timezone identifier is extracted from the symlink target name of /etc/localtime, this file may not be a normal file or hardlink.

However, on a newly-launched AL2023 instance, /etc/symlink is just a plain file.

To Reproduce

Launch an EC2 instance from the al2023-ami-2023.2.20231016.0-kernel-6.1-x86_64 AMI. Run ls -lah /etc/localtime and observe the following output:

-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 114 Oct 16 22:05 /etc/localtime

Expected behavior

I would expect to see something like the following:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 25 Dec 17  2021 /etc/localtime -> ../usr/share/zoneinfo/UTC

Additional context

Running sudo timedatectl set-timezone UTC will fix /etc/localtime to correctly be a symlink.