Re: Simplifying timezone support

"Ross J. Reedstrom" <reedstrm@rice.edu> writes:
> On Thu, Feb 20, 2003 at 03:21:09PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Provide a portable way of getting libc to tell us whether it likes TZ,
>> and I'll be glad to fix this.

> Dang that lovely word 'portable'. However, given your proposed change,
> perhaps the hurdle for portable time handling is now lower: it seems we've
> not been exposed to as broad a range of broken systems as in the past.

On this particular point my threshold of 'portable' is actually pretty
low, as long as it's fail-soft.  Failure to detect bad TZ on some
systems would leave them no worse off than before, right?

But I haven't seen *any* published API that directly tells you whether
tzset liked TZ or not --- AFAICT it's supposed to just silently
substitute GMT.  Which would be okay if "GMT" were the only allowed
spelling of GMT, but it ain't ...
        regards, tom lane