Re: [MiNT] UTC documentation uploaded

[Guido.Flohr@t-online.de (Guido Flohr)]

Hi,

On Mon, Dec 04, 2000 at 05:34:38PM +0200, Martin-Éric Racine wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> After finally achieving my conversion to UTC successfully, I have
> written a short document on how to proceed, for people who find
> the idea of using UTC as daunting as "wasting" a partition into
> a Minix or ext2 filesystem.

Thanks.

> In any case, it appreas that recent changes in MINTLIB have fixed
> problems I previously encountered (Thanks Guido!), while Petr's
> newest Clocky is finally timezone friendly.
> 
> You can find my "Guide to using MiNT in UTC" at:
> http://pp.fishpool.fi/~q-funk/mint-UTC.htm

I will look it over, ok?

Just a proposal: I have finally had a look how other operating systems
that typically share a machine with non-Unix OSes handle the UTC/Localtime
problem. I was quite surprised to see that Linux for instance doesn't even
try to change the hardware clock when the system time changes.  MiNT often
behaves in the same way and until lately I have considered that a bug.
Under Linux you need a special program hwclock to write back the system
time to the CMOS clock.

FreeBSD seems to have a similar mechanism, although somewhat closer to the
MiNT approach.  AFAIR the corresponding tool is called adjkerntz.

What if we would do the same in MiNT? Simply don't even try to change the
hardware clock but leave that task to external software.  You would still
use tzinit to tell the kernel whether the system clock is UTC or
localtime.  But the kernel would never write that back.  Instead a new
program - maybe hwclock - would do that.

Comments? Konrad, what are you doing around Xmas? ;-)

Ciao

Guido