[tz] OpenJDK/CLDR/ICU/Joda issues with Ireland change

J William Piggott elseifthen at gmx.com
Fri Jan 26 13:13:47 UTC 2018



On 01/25/2018 08:05 PM, Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 01/25/2018 04:52 PM, Guy Harris wrote:
>> 2) applications that need to know offset from UTC at any given
>> instance should do so by doing strftime(buf, bufsize, "%z", tm) and
>> parsing the result;
> 
> Sort of.  That method works only if the UTC offset is a multiple of 1
> minute.  This is a safe assumption for modern civil timestamps, but if
> you want to go back before 1972 in tzdb, or if you want to support
> odd-but-valid POSIX TZ strings, a more-reliable approach is to call
> localtime and gmtime on the same timestamp, and subtract the results
> by hand with the usual Gregorian rules.  (And yes, that's what some
> applications do - of course it's much easier and faster to use
> tm_gmtoff when available.)

I apologize for going further off topic, but I've long had a question
about this.

Rather than requiring applications to "call localtime and gmtime ... and
subtract the results by hand", why couldn't the function(s) used by
tzset for the tm_gmtoff value be made available for applications? That
is, offer an API to get the offset directly from TZ/tzfile, instead of
relying on complex and imprecise math (e.g., the glibc comment: it's OK
to assume that A and B are close to each other). I just recently had to
add this tm_diff() math to util-linux, it seems unnecessary to require
this duplication.

BTW, I think the information in the message that I'm replying to is very
useful. Perhaps it should be documented in the glibc manual and elsewhere?





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