[tz] localtime.c patch

[Paul Eggert]

On 10/08/2014 12:00 AM, Clive D.W. Feather wrote:
> the view of WG14 was always that the representations of types stuff 
> added in C99 was intended to have always applied to C90

Thanks, that's good to know if we run into this issue again in the future.

> I can see that POSIX says "The type
> ssize_t shall be capable of storing values at least in the range [-1,
> {SSIZE_MAX}].", but that doesn't exempt it from the C rules concerning
> types.

Well, in *theory* ssize_t could be an extended integer type using one's 
complement and SSIZE_MAX could be 1, no?  As far as I can tell nothing 
in the C standard prohibits that, and that would mean one couldn't 
necessarily store -2 into an ssize_t variable.

Of course this is purely a theoretical objection, but I've always been 
suspicious of that POSIX rule about -1 and ssize_t -- the rule must be 
there for a reason, though they don't explain the reason -- and so 
prefer to avoid ssize_t except to hold the result of 'read'-like 
syscalls that are defined to return ssize_t.