On Sat, Aug 19, 2006 at 08:50:09PM -0400, Rick Thomas wrote: > >For countries with more than 1 timezone, I want to be able to set a > >default > >timezone for the system based on the offset between the system > >clock and the > >remote timeserver as well... :) > RFC 868 (http://www.rfc-archive.org/getrfc.php?rfc=868) says that the > rdate protocol delivers time as a 32-bit binary integer in units of > seconds since midnight on January first 1900 GMT (time 1 is 12:00:01 > am on 1 January 1900 GMT). > The rdate command prints time in the prevailing timezone (as > specified by the TZ environment variable, to to print the date and > time in UTC, do "TZ=UTC rdate -p"). > There is no option for the rdate command to print anything but a > formated date/time. This means that the output will have to be > parsed back into a binary integer before you do the calculations > needed to deduce the time zone. This is, of course, possible. But > shell script wouldn't be my language of choice for doing it. > Regardless of the language, getting the fiddlly bits just right (leap > years leap seconds) just right is tricky business. It's best to use > a pre-existing library to do the hard part. > Do you have access to perl or python at the time you want to do > this? Do you have access to the date/time libraries for either of > those languages? Nope. > Would it be better to write a simple, one-purpose, C program to do what > you want? Yes, C is the implementation language of choice here. I think the ideal solution would be to add an "output offset" feature to whatever rdate client is used in d-i. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. vorlon@debian.org http://www.debian.org/
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