[tz] A discussion on POSIX on new timezone related C APIs

[Robert Elz]

    Date:        Thu, 12 Nov 2015 15:05:50 -0800
    From:        Guy Harris <guy at alum.mit.edu>
    Message-ID:  <8DD4DDDC-DFE0-487B-8C16-AAFBBAA69D57 at alum.mit.edu>

  | I'm not sure what constitutes an "outsider"; I and, I think,
  | kre were involved with POSIX at some point,

me, not really, but yes, it is not difficult to get involved.

I was fascinated to see the proposal for a localtime() lookalike that
uses timespec and has a sub-second abilities .. I had been contemplating
creating exactly that (in a thread safe way of course) over the past
few weeks (inspired by working on some time parsing code that deals with
times with factional seconds, and does nothing but ignore the fraction,
given there's no place in a struct tm to put it).

I don't think I'd have suggested modifying struct tm though, I would have
just invented a whole new (quite similar...) struct - code to use the new
function, after all, user code would need to be modified in any case,
doing it this way keeps binary compat with existing users of struct tm,
which making the struct bigger does not.

kre