Guy Harris <gharris@sonic.net> writes:
On Mar 5, 2024, at 2:03 PM, Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:
It seems to support what I said: PST8PDT was supported, but :PST8PDT was not.
Yes. As I indicated, they didn't have tzdb code (if they did, that would be a surprise, as the tzdb project didn't exist in 1979/1980), and they didn't support any POSIX extensions to TZ (if they did, that would be a surprise as, at least according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX, the first POSIX standard came out in 1988).
Ah, sorry, I had just misunderstood you. Thank you for the confirmation and reference! Basically, to summarize, up until now I think it was possible to set TZ to PST8PDT and have it work essentially everywhere, no matter how old the edition of UNIX, thanks to the backward compatibility file in tzdata. I think musl may have been the first place where this broke somewhat intentionally. This is not a big deal and I'm not sure I'm arguing that musl should change; I expect interfaces to change over time and it's probably time to assume everyone supports the Olson identifiers. But it is a change in the portability landscape, if a minor one. (Probably one that's been around for a while and I just never noticed because I hadn't been running the INN test suite on Alpine Linux.) -- Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>