<<On Wed, 2 Nov 2011 16:45:00 -0400, Mike Frysinger <vapier@gentoo.org> said:
POSIX already covers things like localtime(). if people want to extend the time API that is part of the C library, then that discussion should happen on the POSIX mailing lists.
Actually, it's generally the preference of the Austin Group to standardize existing practice, so the right thing to do is to add these extensions to tzcode, and then allow the downstream consumers to add them to their C libraries as they see fit. Then a proposal can be written to include them in POSIX (or in the next revision of C, which is a different standards committee, since they are actually C standard library functions). I would very much like to see this happen. The only quibble I would make with Christos's proposed API is that, because C does not have incomplete typedefs, a new foo_t type should not be introduced. Using such typedefs creates undesirable ordering dependencies between headers (not a problem for the Implementation but definitely a problem for applications if they want to minimize namespace pollution). Using an incomplete structure type has all the benefits of a typedef and none of the drawbacks. If the proposal is adopted by either C or POSIX, they will ignore the drawbacks and create a new _t type anyway, but since they have joint custody of the "_t" namespace, they can at least guarantee that it's defined in an official system header as well. -GAWollman