Alan Altmark wrote:
On Tuesday, 10/22/2002 at 06:50 CET, Alan Cox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
How quaint
To answer the other Linux question. The date can also be altered (root
only) by the date command. Time zone is settable by any user as an
environment variable.
I think you are getting the wrong idea.
Now, VM does provide a facility for a guest to learn about timezone
shifts. If someone wanted to write the driver for it, Linux could learn
when SET TIMEZONE is done, and change the default TZ on the fly. But,
presumably Linux can already handle this itself without any assistance
from external sources.
I think the situation is that Linux the kernel does not care about time
zones nor about time change rules. And it should not, given
geographically dispersed users of processes running under a single
Linux. It's the GNU side of GNU/Linux that has the job. Timezone
processing is done "on the fly" by glibc every time wall-clock time is
requested.
Have a look in /usr/share/zoneinfo/America for the 119 places in America
alone for which GNU has provided time zone and time change information.
There are over 1500 timezone descriptions. I found this from looking
at man pages tzset(3), tzselect(8), tzfile(5). Give the tzselect
command and let it talk you through timezone setup, for fun.
Dick Hitt [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Alan Altmark
Sr. Software Engineer
IBM z/VM Development
