bug introduced in 2.0.34

Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl
Sun, 18 Oct 1998 17:39:09 +0200 (MET DST)


A moment ago I looked a bit at patch-2.0.34, and saw

# grep tz_dsttime patch-2.0.34
patch-2.0.34:+ if (sys_tz.tz_dsttime) {
patch-2.0.34:+ if (sys_tz.tz_dsttime) unix_date += 3600;
patch-2.0.34:+ if (sys_tz.tz_dsttime)

However, this is altogether wrong.
The person who wrote this didnt understand the meaning of the tz_dsttime
field of a struct timezone.

Quoting from man settimeofday:

The field tz_dsttime contains a symbolic constant (values
are given below) that indicates in which part of the year
Daylight Saving Time is in force. (Note: its value is con­
stant throughout the year - it does not indicate that DST
is in force, it just selects an algorithm.)

...

The use of the timezone struct is obsolete; the tz_dsttime
field has never been used under Linux - it has not been
and will not be supported by libc or glibc. Each and
every occurrence of this field in the kernel source (other
than the declaration) is a bug.

So, it must be a bad idea to introduce more of these bugs,
instead of removing the few occurrences that exist.

Andries

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