Re: [MiNT] timezone change

[Guido Flohr <guido@freemint.de>]

On Wed, Mar 29, 2000 at 10:56:57PM +0100, Anthony Jacques wrote:
> > Unix UTC timestamps are simply an
> > integer number (the number of seconds since Jan 1, 1970, 0:00 UTC).
> > GEMDOS timestamps are broken-down (i. e. hour, minute, second, day, month,
> > year are all stored in a separate integer value).  Arithmetics on Unix
> 
> Who says localtime needs to be stored in that format?

GEMDOS. ;-)
No, sure you're right, and the kernel actually stores localtime in exactly
the same format as UTC.

> Ie, to convert from BST (British Summer Time, GMT +1) to UTC is a simple
> addition of 3600 (60 minutes of 60 seconds). The kernel can store this
> offset calculated whenever told that the localtime has been changed via some
> OS call (eg by your timezone database program) and make all your "extremely
> difficult" LT -> UTC conversions extremely simple.
> 
> I really dont see any problem with keeping the RTC in localtime and
> converting to UTC for internal use.

There are problems in the implementation.  It's hard to explain
(especially because I haven't understood the reason for all of these
problems) but they exist.

> > Besides, you don't want to get ruled by those dudes that live in Greenwich
> > near London (btw, Portugal, Eire and West Africa are mostly the same
> > timezone as the UK).  But there are many countries in this world that
> 
> Greenwich, like the rest of the UK is on BST now, so is GMT + 1. IIRC there
> is somewhere in the world which doesnt have summertime that is also in the
> greenwich meridian, but certainly the UK is not currently in GMT.

Believe it or not, that isn't new to me. ;-)
Besides, just to make that clear, I (hopefully) never make assumptions
about somebody's character depending on where this person was born or
lives.  And I certainly don't think there are more dudes in Greenwich than
in the rest of the world.

And, btw, GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) is not the same as UTC (Universal
Time Coordinated) what we are talking about here.  They are very close to
each other and that's what makes some people think that they get ruled by
Greenwich folks when running a computer clock in UTC.

Ciao

Guido
-- 
http://stud.uni-sb.de/~gufl0000/
Send your spam to president@whitehouse.gov and your replies to
mailto:guido at freemint dot de