Timezone stuff and System V Verification Suite

Robert Elz seismo!munnari!kre
Fri Jul 24 15:08:19 UTC 1987


    Date:        Thu, 23 Jul 87 11:12:18 pdt
    From:        scubed!ncr-sd!ncrcae!sauron!wescott
    Message-ID:  <8707231812.AA04952 at SCUBED.ARPA>

[Keith: there has been a typo in your host name, so if you're
not on elsie!tz you probably missed most of this discussion,
I thought I'd fix it now...]

    And the matter gets worse
You're not joking.

    There is a new extern long to go along with timezone called "altzone"
    which holds the value of the daylight saving time "timezone" offset.

Its clear that they haven't realized yet that 2 zones isn't
enough, nor are 3 letter zone names.

Is there anyone from AT&T on this list, or who has good contacts
inside AT&T, who might be able to dig out whoever it is that is
actually working on this stuff for Sys V.n releases, so that they
might be persuaded that continually adding grunge to TZ simply
isn't a "good thing" and in any case will never get things right.

There must be someone in there who can actually make some kind of
decision on thingslike this, or at least, try to persuade the decision
makers that the current direction is hopeless.

    The ctime(3c) man page also describes two new routines that allow
    user control of the formatting of the string as well as using non-english
    names (under the control of the env. var. LANGUAGE).

I have no real objection to this, though I've never understood
how much more control of formatting its possible to have than
is provided with localtime() and printf()!

kre



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