Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cuae2!ihnp4!ptsfa!lll-lcc!ames!oliveb!sun!gorodish!guy
From: guy@gorodish.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.bugs.misc
Subject: Re: diffs for ctime.c for new DST rules, v7 systems
Message-ID: <12998@sun.uucp>
Date: Tue, 10-Feb-87 13:24:29 EST
Article-I.D.: sun.12998
Posted: Tue Feb 10 13:24:29 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 11-Feb-87 20:32:22 EST
References: <1565@lsuc.UUCP> <1151@ukecc.uky.csnet>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Reply-To: guy@sun.UUCP (Guy Harris)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
Lines: 15

>I think we've all seen this coming, but shouldn't the writers of our
>respective flavors of UNIX be providing the fixes. I'm not knocking
>David's good intentions, but the DST switch can be viewed as a MAJOR
>software bug worthy of an OFFICIAL update.

The major software bug here is that the DST tables are compiled into
programs.  Arthur Olson of NIH has fixed this; he has posted various
versions of a new flavor of "ctime" that reads the tables from a
file, so if the rules change you just change the file.  (No, stuffing
it into the environment won't work: 1) the environment variable would
have to be immensely long to hold a complete set of rules and 2) if
you decided to get clever and call the environment variable "TZ",
under S3/S5, at least, you'd break *all* the programs out there that
don't expect all this goo in TZ and you'd have to recompile them
all.)