bug or feature? mktime sets tzname to historical zone names

Jonathan Lennox lennox at cs.columbia.edu
Sun Jun 17 00:29:35 UTC 2001


I discovered, in the course of working on my thread-safe time zone changes,
an interesting side-effect of mktime().

The localsub() function sets tzname[tm->tm_isdst] to the correct zone
abbreviation, as of the time it calculates.  This is probably correct for
localsub() as called by localtime().

However, since time2sub() calls localsub() (as the funcp passed it by
mktime()), mktime() *also* sets tzname, to the time zone in effect at the
time of mktime()'s argument.  Additionally, because of time2sub()'s binary
search, the other element of tzname (tzname[!tm->tm_isdst]) is often also
set, to something random.  (This will usually be the other time zone
abbreviation in effect at that time, but it'd probably be pretty
straightforward to construct some weird cases where it's a zone abbreviation
used long in the past or future.)

Is this:
* a bug, which should be fixed in tzcode?
* a feature, and thus I need to make sure this behavior is maintained by any
changes I make to the guts of tzcode when adding the thread-safe functions?
* undefined behavior, since mktime() behaves "as though it called tzset()",
but tzset() is poorly defined in the presence of changing time zone
abbreviations?

The attached C program illustrates the behavior in question.  (Europe/Riga
uses EET/EEST now, but used MSK/MSD in 1981.)

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-- 
Jonathan Lennox
lennox at cs.columbia.edu


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