This is Patch 1. This patch improves localtime's error handling, to optionally print actual error messages if a requested zone can't be loaded. For various reasons, though, the error messages go only halfway: they will say things like "can't load zone %s", but they are *not* able to say things like "/usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York: No such file or directory". (Personally, I consider this sort of lack a nearly fatal flaw in a system error message.) As you might guess, this shortcoming will be addressed in Patch 2. If it's not obvious, the way to enable the optional error messages is either to call tz_set_stderr_warn_func(), which requests that they be sent to stderr, or to call tz_set_warn_func(), which lets you install your own error-printing callback function (with the signature of printf). Also enclosed is a one-line patch to tzcode's copy of date.c adding a call to tz_set_stderr_warn_func. One other mild drawback of this code is that it, unsurprisingly, uses stdio. Once this patch is applied, tzcode depends on stdio again, not long after someone's careful attempt to break that dependency. This patch is with respect to 2017c. Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com