[tz] Question about bug seen in OpenBSD and FreeBSD related to tzname

[Robert Elz]

    Date:        Sat, 23 Nov 2019 02:52:43 -0500
    From:        Andras Farkas <deepbluemistake at gmail.com>
    Message-ID:  <CAA0nTRsAVKLycy=kxt3BMHDv9zmSUEZTMdAbRfO3P+V22aS3vA at mail.gmail.com>

  | (because it IS the implementation, yet it's also not the OS)

That distinction, which is made by many standards in various fields
is totally worthless - whether any particular piece of code (or
hardware or whatever) is implementation or application (or however
the relevant standard attempts to divide the world into two groups)
depends entirely upon where you are looking at it from.

tzcode as a separate software chunk is defiitely application when
viewed from the system provider's point of view, but typically becomes
implementation (and is viewed as that) when integrated into libc and
viewed from a normal user's point of view.

But even there, from the compiler writer's point of view, the compiler
(and base system it runs on) is the implementation, and everything that
the compiler compiles is application - including libc.

And where you'd think that code that calls tzset()/localtime()/... must
be application, you find a system provided library (like say syslog(3))
which does that, and is really implementation.

The whole distinction is nonsense.

kre

ps: you might thing that the chips (processor, memory, etc) are definitely
part of the implementation, but from the fabricator's point of view, they're
implementations making use of the basic functionality provided by the
underlying silicon...