TZ Rationalization Requested

Doug Gwyn gwyn at brl-vgr.ARPA
Sun Mar 11 12:46:37 AEST 1984


?  I thought the convention on USG UNIXes was to set TZ in one of the
rc files so that it would be in everyone's environment.

I don't know why Berkeley didn't make the timezone offset returned by
gettimeofday() be in seconds instead of minutes (minor quibble).

Note to recipients of the BRL UNIX System V emulation for 4.2BSD:
John Quarterman pointed out the consquences of a lack of TZ in 4.2BSD
users' environments, and I have fixed ctime.c/tzset() to get the zone
from the kernel via _gettimeofday() if TZ is not in the environment.
This is a simple patch, but let me know if you need the updated source.

MY complaint about all this is that the Berkeley kernel does not
supply the timezone name (CST, CDT, etc.).  Otherwise their system call
seems like$!good idea, provided that TZ in the environment is allowed
to override the system timezone for those rare cases where that is
useful.



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