Re: [MiNT] timezone change

[Martin-Éric Racine <q-funk@pp.fishpool.fi>]

On 2000-4-3, Guido Flohr <gufl0000@stud.uni-sb.de> wrote:

> But then the potential gain is miniscule and you can just as
> well call tzinit from within mint.cnf.

Two problems I see with TZINIT:

The filesystem on which the database resides is not yet checked.
The database may need occasional updating.

Because of this, I tend to prefer the solution I outlined in the
previous e-mail, where only the offsets to UTC and summertime day
matter and the zone names themselves don't make any difference.
It could also easily be implemented within the kernel.

> I prefer the tzinit solution because it allows you to do that
> any time you want without booting.

As my own experience prooves, most applications tend to change
zone by themselves, based on some american timezone embeded in
the source code, and to ignore whatever timezone the kernel has.
Cron and ircII are two that immediately come to mind.

Even worse, those that _do_ check the environment string to adapt
usually expect the older TZ format present in KGMD, even after a
recompile using MINTLIB 0.53 or more recent.

So, calling tzinit some time after midnight only resets the time
of a handfull of applications or daemons, not all of them.  One
still has to reboot or manually restart each of them (SIGHUP does
not necessarilly mean a full restart for all apps; some of them
only re-read their config).

-- 
Martin-Éric Racine  http://funkyware.atari.org/  Atari TT030 FAQ
Lappeenranta, Finland.  Surfing on a Intel/Microsoft-free GEM OS