Daylight Saving Time

Robert Elz kre at munnari.OZ
Sat Apr 5 07:01:41 AEST 1986


In article <63 at man.cs.uxuk.ac.>, neil at uk.ac.man.cs.ux (Neil Todd) writes:
> What DOES really bug me is that only Britain and Portugal use what
> Unix calls WET (Western European Time). Why, oh why can't they just
> let us use GMT and BST (British Summer Time). I'm pretty sure that
> there are more sites in Britain than in Portugal. I asked UCB
> but was met with a deafening silence.

Sorry about that - we were led to believe that the UK had
joined the EEC and had given up some of its local foibles.
(4.2's ctime is largely my fault).

However, all is not lost, while not many people are aware of
it, 4.2 allows you to have almost anything you like as your
timezone name, just put TZNAME=GMT,BST in your environment
and your wish is fulfilled.

The parenthetical comment about 4.2 ctime being my fault
above really means that - it is clearly not adequate.  It's
true that its better than V7 or SysV, but its not good
enough.  Unfortunately, its not going to be fixed in 4.3,
but you can be sure that 4.4bsd (should there ever be
such an animal) will have something based on Arthur Olson's
code (posted to mod.sources after a lot of discussion in
mod.std.unix - you people do read those groups, surely?)
the precise form will depend on what P1003 finally decide.

Robert Elz		{ukc,mcvax,seismo}!munnari!kre



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