FW: timezone question

[Olson, Arthur David (NCI)]

Be sure direct replies to Durk, who's not on the time zone mailing list.

				--ado

-----Original Message-----
From:	Durk Talsma [SMTP:d.talsma at direct.a2000.nl]
Sent:	Friday, July 16, 1999 11:09 AM
To:	tz at elsie.nci.nih.gov
Subject:	timezone question

Hello,

First of all, please let me introduce myself, my name is Durk Talsma,
and I am currently helping in developing a GPL'ed Open Source
Flightsimulator (http://www.flightgear.org). One of the things I'm
currently working on is getting the local time right for any given
location of an aircraft. Using your tzcode and tzdata packages, I
started experimenting, and currently I am able to select the nearest
timezone relative to an aircraft's position. 

I also found out that by faking a TZ environment variable, I'm capable
of retrieving the right local time on my linux box. However, one of our
goals is portability, and I don't know whether this trick will also work
on other platforms, such as Windows or the Mac, using their native
localtime() functions. So for this reason, I consider redistributing
your timezone definition files with flightgear, along with a modified
version of the glibc's localtime() function. For this reason, I have two
questions.

First, do you think it is necessary to do this, or is there a relatively
simple way to get this information from the native OS'ses? And second,
are we allowed to use your timezone information files, or code, and
redistribute them with our project? 

By the way, the email adres I'm posting to right now was the only adress
I could find for contacting you. Currently, I don't know who I'm sending
this to, and I also don't know whether I'm sending this message to a
private mail adress or a mailinglist. I also hope that my questions are
appropriate to send to this adress.

I've attached my latest message to the flightgear developers mailinglist
below, to explain a little further what I'm working on.

Thanks for reading.
Best regards,
Durk Talsma 



Hi,

In part, this message is to give a small update on my timezone parsing
code, and in part it is also intended to get some advice. First of all,
it looks like I made good progress on the timezone parsing code.
Currently, I'm able to parse the timezone database, and select the
nearest timezone, based on the angle between my current location and the
location of the timezone centerpoints, as described in the zone.tab file
(thanks Norman!). Currently, I'm only using a spherical world model, but
since I've written a little class to store geographical coordinates,
this should be pretty easy to convert to something a little more
complex.

As for retaining the current local time, my original intention was to
write some code of my own to parse the timezone values, but just before
doing so, I found out that these functions are part of glibc already.
So, after hacking around a little, I found out that localtime is
determined through an environment var, that points to a file containing
timezone info. So under linux, this stuff becomes pretty simple:

1. set up a fake environment var e.g. (pseudo code)
char ** fake = { "europe/Amsterdam", 0};
environ = fake;

2. Get the time
getlocaltime();

3. Restore
environ = oldEnviron; // point the environment to its origninal location



I'm also pretty convinced that this won't work under other platforms, as
those have a different mechanism for retrieving timezone info. So my
idea would be to adapt the glibc code for use in flightgear, and also
making the timezone informationfiles part of the fgfsbase package. After
all, this is pretty close to my original idea of writing my own tz
parser. This would save me quite some time.

On the other hand, and this is my question: if somebody has a better
idea,  than I'd be very interested.

Regards,
Durk

--
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
You can contact me at:
pn_talsma at macmail.psy.uva.nl          (work)
talsma at uvapsy.psy.uva.nl         (more work)
d.talsma at direct.a2000.nl      (home at last)

Or visit my website at:
http://people.a2000.nl/dtals
----------------------------------------------------------------------
"Dave, this conversation can serve no further purpose anymore, goodbye"

                                                           - HAL 9000 -




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