[tz] Reading binary files

[Garrett Wollman]

<<On Wed, 2 Nov 2011 10:58:05 -0400, "Thom Hehl" <Thom at pointsix.com> said:

> Not if you are writing applications that need high performance
> processing of multiple timezones and access from multiple languages and
> platforms. Besides, we're multi-threaded. Changing environment variables
> is simply not an option. Yikes! Can you say race condition.

A thread-safe API has been proposed on the predecessor to this list a
few times in the recent past, and I believe someone actually posted
patches at one point.  This would give you versions of tzset(),
localtime(), and mktime() that used explicit (non-shared) state rather
than the shared state required by the functions in the C standard.

-GAWollman