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Re: daylight savings time: POSIX vs real world



On Thu, 1 May 1997 jwalther@citytel.net wrote:

> I dont know if the failure of daylight savings is due to POSIX like the
> timezone wierdness is or not, but heres my beef.

Well, the difference between POSIX and real times is the second at the
end of the year.  POSIX diesn't deal correctly with it.  The deal with
this second is something really weird -- every year or so there's
additional second in a minute (a 61 second minute).  Check
alt.folklore.computers -- they had a posting about it some days ago.

> For ages, my box was an hour behind, because we had daylight savings time.
> I was just to lazy to set the right time with "date"

The Right Thing is to set your hardware clock to GMT and change the
line `GMT=""' to `GMT="-u"' in /etc/init.d/boot.

> But lo and behold, one day I boot into win95 (you can tell I dont use it
> much :>) and it puts the clock forward to the right time for me.

Win95 tries to be too smart and change the clock for you when you pass
the Standard / Daylight Saving times border (in the spring and in the
autumn).  Maybe you can tell Win95 that you have GMT time in BIOS and
prevent it from dealing with the clock.

> I dont know why, but I was positive that Unix handling of time was much
> superior to anything else.

The new standard, zic files, actually _is_ superior to anything else.
BTW, I know this because I work with a guy who is responsible for
Israeli timezones in all the Unix boxen around the world.
ftp://ftp.cs.huji.ac.il/pub/tz/israel/linux/zicfile is this.

Vadik.

--
begin 644 .signature
M26YQ=GH@26QT8F%R9V8@*B!I;G%V>$!P9BYU:'=V+FYP+G9Y("H@:6YQ=GA`
8<7)O=FYA+F)E="`J($AA=FL@;G%Z=F$*
`
end


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