On 2023-12-19 23:30, Philip Paeps wrote:
On 2023-12-19 15:25:55 (+0800), Paul Eggert via tz wrote:
* tzselect.ksh (tz): Rename this shell variable from TZ, so that invoked commands don’t change behavior merely because tzselect is speculating about what TZ setting the user wants. This is a safety measure for oddball platforms where this might make a difference, as POSIX allows utilities to crash if TZ is bogus.
Do such oddball platforms exist in the wild?
Yes, we've seen a report of such a problem with old FreeBSD versions, as well as in old tzcode versions. See, for example: https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/1997-January/009772.html To be honest, though, I had forgotten about these old bug reports. I made the change mostly because it's better to be careful with TZ settings in a utility that's designed to let you choose TZ and that lets you specify the TZ string yourself.
To a casual reader, seeing $tz instead of $TZ may be confusing.
Yes, I renamed it that way mostly to avoid indenting changes....
Should we use $tz_for_date instead of $TZ_for_date for consistency?
I didn't make that change, mostly to avoid bloating the output of 'git diff' and thus making it easier to review. Could make the change later at some point; low priority of course.