🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <234@sysdes.UUCP> dk@sysdes.UUCP writes:
.
.
>
>The UK (please correct me if I err) seems to resort to Parliamentary
>announcements (or other black arts) to set DST, so hard-wiring
>it as now is not on.
>
Stand corrected, I've had the following ctime.c in various machines
for some time now.



/*
 * The European tables ... based on hearsay
 * Believed correct for:
 *	WE:	Great Britain(WRONG use gbdaytab), Portugal?
 *	ME:	Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway,
 *		Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Sweden, Switzerland,
 *		DDR, DBR, France, Spain, Hungary, Italy, Jugoslavia
 *		Finland (EE timezone, but ME dst rules)
 * Eastern European dst is unknown, we'll make it ME until someone speaks up.
 *	EE:	Bulgaria, Greece, Rumania, Turkey, Western Russia
 *
 * Ireland is unpredictable.  (Years when Easter Sunday just happens ...)
 * Years before 1983 are suspect.
 */

/* NCT addition */
static struct dstab gbdaytab[] = {
	0,	91,	303,
};


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.

> The current version (USG at least) of localtime in UNIX
> allows you to set whether a time zome has Daylight Saving Time, but
> no obvious method of changing the days on which DST takes effect.
> 
Thats not the only problem - how do you cater for timezones that aren't
a multiple of 1 hour distance from GMT?

The TZ variable allows saying  TZ=xxxyzzz  where xxx is the normal
name of the timezone (without DST), y is the number of HOURS from GMT
(that has to be changed in heaps of shellscripts when daylight savings
starts and ends), and zzz is the name of the timezone when DST is in effect.
 
I rekon that the BSD way of keeping the timezone info in the kernel is more
sensible, as it guarantees uniformity for all processes in the system.  Perhaps
a cron script particular to each machines' timezone can be used to alter
DST at appropriate times of the year for those countries that seem
to keep changing DST (by adb'ing the kernel? - Yuk!)

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			    Ian Donaldson

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In article <63@man.cs.uxuk.ac.>, neil@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

In article <204@Unison6.OZ>, rcodi@Unison6.UUCP writes:
>I rekon that the BSD way of keeping the timezone info in the kernel is more
>sensible, as it guarantees uniformity for all processes in the system.  Perhaps
>a cron script particular to each machines' timezone can be used to alter
>DST at appropriate times of the year for those countries that seem
>to keep changing DST (by adb'ing the kernel? - Yuk!)
>			    Ian Donaldson

Why adb the kernel?  A privileged system call would do.  Of course a program
which used the system call to set the time zone details would have to be
invoked every time the machine was rebooted, but that's easy.  And why use
a cron script?  Deep internally the machine would know GMT (say), but would
actually perform transactions in terms of the local time as figured by a
table implanted in the kernel via the aforementioned system call. The
default (prior to system call) could be something reasonable based on data
furnished when the kernel was made.  Surely this has been suggested before?
-- 
 -------------------------------    Disclaimer:  The views contained herein are
|       dan levy | yvel nad      |  my own and are not at all those of my em-
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| at&t computer systems division |  upon which I may hack.
|        skokie, illinois        |
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