[tz] The zoneinfo file system tree structure ?

random832 at fastmail.us random832 at fastmail.us
Fri Feb 13 19:52:20 UTC 2015


On Thu, Feb 12, 2015, at 16:56, J William Piggott wrote:
> Is there a reason that the old tree structure is still being used?
> 
> Does it break something to have 'right' and 'posix' as sibling
> directories?

Isn't it a bit obnoxious to create three directories in /usr/share?
Also, to me this raises the question of why the files are installed at
all, if they shouldn't be used without rearranging everything (you could
just as easily rebuild from source). What distributions are doing this,
and is there a possibility of an actual dialogue with their maintainers
rather than just wondering what they're thinking?

Do we know if other packages like ntp are actually able to handle the
"right" situation correctly, even _with_ the appropriate UTC zone
installed? Nevermind the fact that no-one actually uses
time2posix/posix2time, and there's been no real effort to identify
programs that need it (any tar archiver would be an example) and
evangelize these functions to those projects. Maybe it's time to stop
shipping these files entirely, and ask some serious questions about the
future of leap second support.

I think the core problem is that the use of a numeric time_t-like format
for representing leap-aware timestamps is an attractive nuisance in a
world where POSIX mandates a non-leap-aware version. If anything, I
think the most likely conclusion is that these maintainers are likely
trying to maintain backwards compatibility for people who do broken
things like TZ=right/whatever not knowing any better.


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