From: tomp@zk3.dec.com Date: Wed, 14 Feb 96 10:42:07 -0500
My man page on mktime() (Solaris2) clearly says that 'tm_year of the tm structure must be for year 1970 or later.'
This would seem to limit the usefulness of timezone rules prior to 1970 with respect to mktime(). Perhaps they did this for standards compliance? No standard that I know of requires that mktime fail before the epoch. Most likely Solaris 2 does it that way because SVR4.0 did it that way. I've asked Sun to fix this, since the Solaris 2.5 behavior is schizophrenic. For example, Solaris 2.5 localtime works fine on times before the epoch, which means that mktime is not the inverse of localtime as it should be. Solaris 2.5 has other problems in this area; see Sun bug 1229958 (``ctime, localtime functions slow and incorrect'').