Re: [MiNT] TZ change?

[Guido Flohr <gufl0000@stud.uni-sb.de>]

On Mon, Oct 25, 1999 at 08:40:02AM +0300, Martin-Eric Racine wrote:
> Hi Guido!
> 
> I noticed this morning that ircII shows a time that is one hour
> ahead of the system time.  Since it was compiled in USA (Kellis,
> TZ:ESTEDT) I was wondering if USA just changed to Winter time?

I think they change on the last Sunday in October, not sure.

> How this would affect the behavior of software compiled with time
> zone specific functions? 

Not at all.

> Obviously, the next question is, is the new MINTLIB compiled in a
> timezone-independant context? 

Obviously not. Every libc internally handles all time values in UTC (or
GMT whatever name you prefer). When the libc pretty-prints these
timevalues it has to know which timezone the run-time machine (not the
compile-time machine) is located in.

Either ircII is compiled with an old MiNTLib (the default rule used to be:
change from summer to winter time on the first Sunday in October) or you
run ircII in a "wrong" environment, i. e. TZ is set to a value not
suitable.

Have you got "ident"? If not, install rcs and you have it.  Then run ident
"ircII" and you can see which MiNTLib version is compiled into ircII.  If
it has a "dot version" (i. e. something like 0.52, not PL 52) then it
should be alright.

Then run ircII in three different environments:

	(unset TZ; ircII)
	TZ=Europe/Helsinki ircII
	TZ=EEST-3 ircII
	
It should always display the same time. If not, something is wrong. Then
install GNU sh-utils linked against a recent MiNTLib and do the same as
above with the "date" command.  It should always display a date in "EEST",
three hours ahead of UTC (check that your system time is correct with
"TZ=GMT date", it should display 02:00 GMT instead of 05:00 EEST
localtime).

If you still have problems, rearrange your tz links with

	zic -l Europe/Helsinki -p Europe/Helsinki

Hope this helps.

BTW, you can also rename the mintlib rpm to "timelib-rpm" and then install
it.  This will hopefully only ask you once for your timezone and all later
installations will obey that initial setting unless you change the file
/etc/sparemint/timezone.

Ciao

Guido
-- 
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