[tz] As long as we're looking at the Theory file...

Guy Harris guy at alum.mit.edu
Tue May 8 17:51:48 UTC 2012


It says

*       This package is already part of many POSIX-compliant hosts,
        including BSD, HP, Linux, Network Appliance, SCO, SGI, and Sun.
        On such hosts, the primary use of this package
        is to update obsolete time zone rule tables.
        To do this, you may need to compile the time zone compiler
        `zic' supplied with this package instead of using the system `zic',
        since the format of zic's input changed slightly in late 1994,
        and many vendors still do not support the new input format. 

NetApp's machines aren't POSIX-compliant - the original Data ONTAP was a very specialized OS, and ONTAP GX or whatever it's called may be FreeBSD-based (with, I think, the NetApp-specific stuff running in special kernel-mode code rather than atop standard FreeBSD) but I'm not sure it supports arbitrary applications.  I'm not sure whether the right solution is to drop "POSIX-compliant" or to put NetApp's machines into a separate category; I'm inclined towards the latter.

In addition, OS X and iOS could be considered to fall under the heading of "BSD", but it might be worth mentioning OS X separately (you wouldn't be able to install zic-compiled tables on non-jailbroken iOS, so I wouldn't mention it).

(Oh, and you might want to say "Solaris" or "Oracle" rather than "Sun", given that Sun Microsystems no longer exists.)


More information about the tz mailing list