time zone survey

Guy Harris guy at auspex.com
Fri Jun 11 01:39:12 UTC 1993


> (Yes, in SysV the file has to be changed every
> year again.  And SGI shows no inclination to change.)

Actually, I think SVR4 includes the Olson code, although I don't think
all SVR4.0 systems supply the Olson files.  However, I infer from one of
Eric Raymond's lists of SVR4 bugs that SVR4.2 does supply the Olson
files *and* uses Olson-style timezone specifications (":" followed by
the time zone file name) by default.

(The bug was that SVR4.0 binaries allegedly don't work with SVR4.2 time
zone names, an example of which was given as "US/Eastern" or something
such as that; that seems a *tad* bizarre, as if SVR4.0 has the Olson
code, SVR4.0 statically-linked binaries should be able to handle
Olson-style names, and SVR4.0 dynamically-linked binaries should use
SVR4.2 shared libraries and should thus also be able to handle them.
Perhaps the bug was that SVR3.x binaries don't handle Olson-style
names.)

SVR4 uses "/etc/TIMEZONE", but you can set TZ to ":MET" and you
shouldn't have to change it every year.  (Also, SVR4 should also support
POSIX-style TZ settings, which should allow you to put in a value that
doesn't require periodic updates *if* your locale's DST rules are
sufficiently "regular" that they can be encoded in the TZ setting.  I
don't know which SVR3.x systems, if any, supported that.)

If, as, and when IRIX goes to an SVR4 base, they should probably pick up
the Olson code with it.



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