List of time zones compliant both for Linux, Solaris 5.8, OSF1 Tru64, HP-UX

[David Keegel]

] > Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001 09:48:19 -0700
] > From: francois reygagne <freygagne at opteway.com>
] > 
] > I'm wondering if it could be possible to use the OLSON data and code
] > instead the specific target OS stuff.
] 
] Yes, that should work.
] 
] All the systems that you mention should read the Olson data files
] as-is; you shouldn't need to link any of the tz code.  That's
] certainly true for Solaris and GNU/Linux (it works for me).  I've been
] told that it works for HP-UX, and from what you write it works for
] Tru64 (which is news to me; I should add Tru64 to the list of systems
] in tz-link).
] 
] To use an Olson data file, set TZ to its fully qualified name.
] E.g. TZ='/usr/share/lib/zoneinfo/Australia/Broken_Hill' works
] on Solaris 8.

You may notice from francois' list that Solaris 8 only installs the
pre-1993 Olson TZ names (eg: US/Pacific) and does not install post-
1993 names (eg: America/Los_Angeles) at all (at least by default).

Although there is now a Sun patch to install Asia/Taipei. Perhaps Sun
are realising that there are geo-political implications to the old
fashioned names like "ROC" (something which no doubt was a factor in
this list's 1993 decision to avoid using country names).

I would have hoped Sun would at least be prepared to run "zic backward"
(or in their case "zic forward"? :-) so that both old and new names are
available (they are hard links so it won't take up any more space).
Then in about 3-5 years they could stop supporting the old names.

Surely this would mean less maintenance work for Sun, tracking tz data.

To francois' specific problem, if you only have one or two machines to
worry about you can grab tzdata and zic it with Solaris /usr/sbin/zic.
That will give you both the latest tz data and the proper (post-1993)
names for the zones.  Then you can change TZ to something modern like
Europe/Paris rather than MET.  Obviously you might want to test first.

__________________________________________________________________________
 David Keegel <djk at cyber.com.au>  URL: http://www.cyber.com.au/users/djk/
Cybersource P/L: Unix Systems Administration and TCP/IP network management