Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!gatech!mcnc!ece-csc!ncrcae!ncrlnk!uunet!munnari!murtoa.cs.mu.oz.au!cs.mu.oz.au!kre
From: kre@cs.mu.oz.au (Robert Elz)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail
Subject: Re: what's the latest official version of sendmail?
Message-ID: <1084@murtoa.cs.mu.oz.au>
Date: 27 Nov 88 07:18:12 GMT
References: <13731@andante.UUCP> <451@arisia.Xerox.COM>
Sender: news@cs.mu.oz.au
Lines: 27

In article <451@arisia.Xerox.COM>, Lovstrand.EuroPARC@Xerox.COM (Lennart)
writes (about putting 5.59 on SunOS):
> all I had to do was to  ... and to
> change the way the local time zone was gathered in arpadate.c to use
> localtime() instead of timezone().

No .. this is a BUG, its always been a sendmail bug, and it should be
fixed.  RFC822 defines exactly 5 3 letter zone names (and the daylight
saving equivalents for the 4 US zones defined), plus "UT", the US military
time 1 letter names, and numeric offsets.

Taking whatever the system has defined the zone name to be, and truncating
that to 3 characters is not a sensible thing to do.

I have modified arpadate.c to generate only the numeric offset (and
consequently gotten rid of the absurd code (sorry Teus) that knew what
the European time zone names would be, and converted those back into
numeric offsets).  This code should work on any system with both localtime()
and gmtime(), and not need special case ifdef's for suns.

I will send the code to Lennart, and to Berkeley.  Hopefully it will turn
up in some future release of sendmail.  If someone wants they could
put special cases in for the known approved zone names, but there doesn't
seem to be any particularly good reason, the numeric offset form is
always acceptable.

kre