zoneinfo/right/

Markus Kuhn Markus.Kuhn at cl.cam.ac.uk
Wed Dec 6 23:05:39 UTC 2000


Andreas Schwab wrote on 2000-12-06 22:15 UTC:
> Chmouel Boudjnah <chmouel at mandrakesoft.com> writes:
> |> Could someone point me who use /usr/share/zoneinfo/right/ ? and if
> |> it's needed ?

Nobody needs this. The "right/" time zones are an experimental mechanism
to play around with an alternative non-POSIX time_t definition, in which
the seconds-since-the-epoch quantity increases even during a leap
second. This is in violation of ISO/IEC 9945-1:1996 section 2.2.2.113
and is clearly not recommended for general use, otherwise your time_t
values will differ from the rest of the world by the TAI-UTC difference
(currently 30 seconds). It has the advantage that time_t becomes a true
second counter that does not behave funnily during leap seconds and
difftime() becomes equivalent to subtraction. Apart from adventurous
leap second geeks, nobody should ever use the "right/ " time zones, as
they might cause your NFS file timestamps and quite a couple of other
applications that depend on the POSIX definition of
seconds-since-the-epoch (which does not count leap seconds) to be wrong
by half a minute. They can safely be omitted from a Linux distribution
if disk space is precious.

> ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzarchive.gz

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>




More information about the tz mailing list