nkn@asgb.UUCP (11/26/84)
<Is there really a line-eater bug?> A month ago I posted a query about how TZ is handled in countries outside of the U.S.A. This is a summary of the responses. First the problems: (1) Some countries have time zones which are not an integral number of hours past GMT. AT&T's UNIX(tm) cannot handle a zone which is, say, 3 1/2 hours past GMT. (2) Different countries begin/end daylight savings time on different days of the year. AT&T's UNIX assumes the begin/end dates are the same everywhere. The solution: (1) I wasn't too worried about this one, since there are many possible fixes. Most people suggested something along the lines of "MST7:30MDT" to indicate that MST is 7 1/2 hours past GMT. This requires a simple fix to tzset() in ctime.c. (2) This one is a little tougher. Berkeley has a good solution here. Under AT&T's UNIX, "daylight" is an on/off flag which indicates whether or not daylight savings time is in effect. Berkeley's "tz_dsttime" not only gives an on/off indication, but also, if on, which table to look up the begin/end dates in. I guess if someone wanted to do this with AT&T's UNIX they would have to add these tables and alter the meaning of "daylight" accordingly. My thanks to all of you who responded. Neil Nelson Burroughs Advanced Systems Group . . .!sdcsvax!bmcg!asgb!nkn