Re: Daylight Savings Time problem

[Guy Maor <maor@ece.utexas.edu>]

On 13 Apr 1996, Daniel Quinlan wrote:
> Guy Maor <maor@ece.utexas.edu> writes:
> 
> > The zoneinfo file does need to be cleaned up though.  There's a LOT
> > of meaningless duplication for example.  Most of it appears to be
> > done through hard links though.  I'll put it on my list of "things
> > to do when I have time."
> 
> The duplicate entries should really be there to make it easier to
> configure, shouldn't they?

Yes, but they don't.

The entire posix dir is identical.  The right dir is not identical, but
who knows what it means.  All the US-style timezones in the root dir
should be erased as they don't have daylight savings code.  A couple of
minor other things - no difference between US/Pacific and
US/Pacific-New.  What is Pacific-New?

> FWIW, there are 465 files in my /usr/lib/zoneinfo.  359 of them are
> unique, according to md5sum.  That means there are only 106
> "unnecessary" duplicates, which should all be linked with one of the
> originals (and probably are).

I have timezone 7.46-1.
1371 files.
682 are unique according to md5sum.
1062 actual different files (ie - different inodes).

So there really is a lot of waste, and it's quite confusing.

> There *must* be more important things to do than nitpicking like this.

I spent maybe 5 minutes fooling around in the zoneinfo dir and typing
this message.  Fixing it would take longer obviously.  In any case we
have to be aware of all the problems before we prioritize them.
Otherwise who's to know whether we are picking nits or not?


Guy


I calculated above numbers with:
find /usr/lib/zoneinfo -type f | wc

find /usr/lib/zoneinfo -type f | xargs md5sum | perl -ane 'print "$F[0]\n"' \
| sort -u | wc

find /usr/lib/zoneinfo -type f | xargs stat | grep '^ino' | sort -u | wc

stat is a small perl script I wrote a while back, pretty useful
actually.  Here it is if anyone cares:
begin 755 stat.gz
M'XL("%[L;S$``W-T870`14]-3X0P%+SW5SPJ,339P.IIHR%A3WOWX,7UP$>1
M%TJ+I;A&PW_WE4(\=*9]G3>9N8NR>;)9A3H;I57`F)6?,UH)O'8XR'14_)FQ
M6X=*0A*W1/G48>N@.+]<7@7\,@!L(8F2`G5K((?)E2XHA0C_`+?2:N#K\`GB
MZ*K)U,^U_';^MM`I_*(N!YDGO)%?_,!1&\+!-))(*]0]\8P-X<>*-N@F_/&*
MT@?FA]68#^$16A!7JM]DE3)U/W%!M0!:8R%&2$YI^G#<T]:=&:FL[_,6XSMU
MNE]M_D="A-0$HT7M@/O@5[<VW-KMUD>R?MRM-W6\=_5FM+;[;JL+6]@?HXR'
%99H!``!"
`
end