On Sep 23, 2025, at 11:51 AM, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
On 2025-09-23 10:05, Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:
The DETECT_TZ_CHANGES patch may be of interest to others, but it should be attributed to NetApp, Inc. rather than to FreeBSD.
What form should the attribution take? I don't see attribution in the FreeBSD time source code. I assume Guy Harris wrote that
I don't remember doing that. The "Timezone change detection" message to the tz list said
Hello. I'm working on upstreaming a patch, which originally came from NetApp, to modify localtime.c to automatically detect changes to the time zone. The use case is to make the applications handle moving between timezones, or changing the default system timezone.
Moving between timezones is far less common for NetApp machines than for, say, laptops running Linux or some flavor of BSD (including CupertinoBSD, which runs on several popular laptops with names containing the string "MacBook"), as most NetApp servers are hard to carry onto any form of transport. :-) Given that, I'm not sure when that entered the code base. I don't *remember* it being added, but then I left NetApp in 2003/2004, so that's 20 years of either neuron death or repurposing. FreeBSD on notebooks would probably be a more common user of that capability, although they might want to take a look at CupertinoBSD's way of handling this, which involves using its notification mechanism, as documented in notify(3). That avoids having to wake up and manually check every minute. (I don't know whether updates to tz files provoke such a notification; they *should*, especially given that I think there's a mechanism to update those in the background, but I don't think they *do*.)
so I'll cc him.
(I'm on the tz list, so no need.)