Calum Benson wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-07-05 at 12:23 +1200, Glynn Foster wrote:
>> Woohoo! Timezone clock feature goes upstream.
> 
> Nice, now we just need to make it suck a little less-- the UI looks kind
> of clunky these days, dunno who was responsible for that :P
> 
> Also kind of ironic/disturbing that the closing comment in the bug
> report is "I really don't know if this will work on Solaris..."
> 
> Cheeri,
> Calum.
> 

I've been mulling over a enhancement to timezones on Solaris; I've
mentioned this before but I was wondering what the desktop folks
think of this idea...

Suppose we invent a new timezone type that represents an additional
level of indirection through a file. It might look something like this:

$ export TZ="</home/barts/.tzfile>"
$ cat /home/barts/.tzfile
US/Pacific
$

The libc timezone code would be modified to stat the file and
reevaluate the timezone should it be updated.

This would support changing the current desktop timezone w/o logging
out or restarting any processes.  Applications that make heavy use
of localtime() or other functions that convert between GMT and localtime
might experience some performance issues, so this might not be
appropriate for applications that do a lot of logging such as
webservers.  For laptops traveling between timezones, it seems a lot
nicer that just crowbaring the system's idea of time with a date(1)
command, esp. since system log files, etc, would still be in whatever
system timezone is used.

- Bart




-- 
Bart Smaalders                  Solaris Kernel Performance
barts at cyber.eng.sun.com              http://blogs.sun.com/barts

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