🚀 go-pugleaf

 In article <857171968_OASIS_@whalley.demon.co.uk>
  john@whalley.demon.co.uk.NOSPAM said:-

>Some time ago during a discussion here about running NOS from the
>desktop rather than from within Oasis and it was suggested that in
>order for the time to be set accurately you needed to set an
>environment variable TZ=GMT0BST.

    Not only for the 'time set' or 'time read' commands, but also for the
NEWNEWS command of the nntp protocol. Needs to be GMT time there, exactly
time of beginning of last successfull nntp session minus 2 minutes (by
security).


>However, I've only been doing this since Septenber. What happens when
>we switch to summer time? Does the TZ variable need changing and if so
>to what?

    AFAIK your TZ variable won't work like it is. It should work, but NOS
seems to have been compiled with a C compiler without proper TZ support.
It relies on the time(), localtime() and gmtime() functions from the
standard library, and in this compiler's library they *seem* to interpret
only the first zone name (GMT) and the first offset (0), the DST part
(BST) is unused...

    So clearly the Sun, 30 Mar 1997 02:00:00 GMT, you should first set
your Atari's clock to 03:00:00, second modify your MAGX.INF, MINT.CNF,
ROOT.ENV or ENVIRON.DAT file setting TZ=BST-1. And then wait Sun, 26 Oct
1997 03:00:00 +0100 (BST) to come back to old settings... I assume here
that your to-STD transition date is last Sunday of October like in France
since 1996, but I'm not sure it's not last Sunday of September like here
until 1995. For the "set Atari's clock" part, you can use Jos den Bekker's
DSTINT.LZH utility, it automates the process. Can be found at Cnam, new
version will be released soon.

    All this is "AFAIK" and "IMHO", I didn't test it extensively, and I
don't know the used compiler and it's libraries (someone can say more
about this?). I try to use the extended TZ syntax, with the transition
dates, like for France TZ=MET-01:00MEST-02:00,M3.5.0/02:00,M10.5.0/03:00
but it's not used by many programs!

    In fact, if someone has any info, source code or list on the timezone
topic, or pointers to, I'm interested, as I'm working on that now. Perhaps
in email, as this group is not really adapted. Especially info on the way
C compilers deal with the problem... I've already tested Pure C, it's
simply no support at all. The programmer must do all by hand, or it will
work correctly only in +0100 winter time (good for me 5 months per year!).
And also a question, what means BST? I have a doc here listing it as
"Brazil Standard Time" with offset GMT -0300, can't be that...


Bye!    Bruno.
--
	/*  Bruno Kozlowski  <bkozlowski@nordnet.fr>  */
	/* -==- A happy Falcon owner from France -==- */