Proposal: API for thread-safe time zone functions

[John Cowan]

Jonathan Lennox wrote:


> * Are people interested in this?


I think it's a good idea.


> * Do people think that my proposal is a sensible API?


My main problem with it is that I see no point in the
struct tz objects.  Programs don't typically do zillions
of time conversions.  I would rather pass the time zone
name to each externally vizible *_z function and let
them look up the name in the currently maintained cache,
if any.  We certainly want to discourage callers from
trying to save the tz structure in a persistent database,
since its content may change over time.

This would require adding a new function to retrieve
the tz_name array for a given time zone name.

I also question the utility of a per-thread current time
zone being maintained by the library, which then has to
know what kind of thread library you have so it can discover
the current thread ID.  Making something thread-safe at
the cost of adding one argument to each tzlib call
is not so bad.

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