Re: Time patch -- let's talk about it.

[Jerry Geiger <jerry@zedat.fu-berlin.de>]

On Mon, 23 Jun 1997, Petr Stehlik wrote:

> ? what is DST? Something with summer time? 
yes, Daylight Saving(s) Time

> If yes, I simply set the actual time into my NVRAM, twice a year.
And I just do nothing, and have a continous time in my machine clock.
- file dates and other timestamps dated in the future look a bit curious :-)

> The 'TIME' cookie already exists (ShowTime and other programs use it). It
> contains the GEMDOS timer value.
I thought of CLOC or CLOK - please see other mail.

> > According to this information the lib will calculate or just get UTC time 
> > from the OS. btw: If you are running your machine with local time you should 
> > have set the TZ env variable including DST information, cause ... 
> 
> Well, and this is something I would not like. I think that a machine with
> local time should not need any env variable or additional cookies for
> running programs linked with MiNTlibs.
A machine with the local time without env TZ: no program can calculate UTC 
time nor the UTC offset!
with TZ variable but without DST information no program can calculate UTC time
nor the UTC offset!
It's not the machine, but some programs that need this information:
So no mailer or sendmail not even 'date' work correctly. Not to talk about
file-date-stamps (ftp, esp. NFS ...) time servers, ...
But if you don't mind - no problem. The lib should use LMT (local mean time)
for an unknown TZ name then.

  jerry
        jerry@merlin.abacus.de          jerry@zedat.fu-berlin.de