On 12/13/2011 04:17, Tomas Hajny wrote:
On Tue, December 13, 2011 01:08, waldo kitty wrote:
On 12/9/2011 07:13, Tomas Hajny wrote:
Obviously assuming that something like that is possible on a certain
platform at all (GO32v2 not having the TZ environment variable defined
will simply never be able to provide UTC time; in fact, the same applies
for OS/2 / eCS too).
never say never... my OS/2 systems do know about and use the TZ
environment variable... some programs on those systems also use the TZUTC
environment variable... my oldest OS/2 system is Warp 3 Connect and it has
been using these EVs since Warp 3 Connect was made available to the public
;)
now, i should point out, which i kinda of lightly did above, that the OS
may or may not use these but those programs which know about them can and
do...
I don't say never, just that neither DOS nor OS/2 enforce or validate this
setting and thus it's purely up to the user to make sure that it
eventually works.
i understand and yes, you are right, neither of them enforces or validates this
setting... i was, actually, aiming at "never" in "[...] will never be able to
[...]" all my systems, OS/2, DOS, Winwhatever, and linux are set to local
time... when they need to provide a UTC timestamp, they do otherwise it is local
time... at least this is my experience and has been for "ever"... i have never
run any of my systems in UTC time and expected them to convert all the time to
local time...
however, back to the TZ and such... i wrote a library for TP6/BP6 that emulated
parts of the C time stuff using a slightly modified tm_rec... i needed this so i
could work on an external means of changing some settings when daylight saving
switched on and off in my area... these settings were specific to a few programs
and i wanted to automate the switchover so that their outputs were not an hour
off either way... i even took the opportunity to "borrow" novell's DSTSTART and
DSTSTOP style settings... they look like this...
DSTSTART=second sunday in march at 2:00
DSTSTOP=first sunday in november at 2:00
granted, that info may be gleaned from the long form of TZ but i didn't code for
that in my stuff at that time... i was only interested in the current timezone,
what the offset from UTC was at the time, and when daylight saving switched on
and off... i still use this at least eight year old code in numerous projects i
still maintain with TP/BP6 ;)
Not even mentioning the attempts of an author of certain
command shell who apparently tries to make the situation even more
confusing (however smart he may be) by trying to convince others that IBM
wanted something else than what they really did :/ (if you don't know whom
or what I talk about, forget it, it isn't very important).
yes, i know exactly who you are talking about ;) i was an active beta tester of
his products as well as a distributor of them on fidonet... i'm still on fidonet
but haven't heard anything from JdBP in a long while...
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