Darren J Moffat wrote:
> Bart Smaalders wrote:
>> Changing the system time is just wrong; we need a way to
>> have a "rubber" timezone then.  I want logs, etc, to
>> remain ordered in the "systems" view of time; having
>> /var/log/* files out of order because we're monkeying with
>> the system clock to get the desktop time right is backwards.
>>
>> If we can handle daylight savings time, we can have a traveling
>> time zone for desktops.
> 
> Agreed but we need it to be possible without requiring a logout/login 
> event.
> 

After talking to our standards guru, it appears that
the behavior of timezones beginning w/ something other than
a letter or a : is undefined.  It appears possible to grab
some punctuation (say a leading '/' :-)) and define a new
behavior for such timezones that causes them to be interpreted
as a file containing the name of the current timezone.

This would allow changing a timezone dynamically by modifying
the file to contain the name of the newly desired timezone;
applications would transparently get the new timezone when
they next called ctime and friends.

- Bart



-- 
Bart Smaalders                  Solaris Kernel Performance
barts at cyber.eng.sun.com              http://blogs.sun.com/barts

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