<<On Wed, 04 May 2005 06:34:22 +0700, Robert Elz <kre@munnari.oz.au> said:
And that's even if putting system type information into environment variables (as distinct from user overrides of system information) wasn't fundamentally the wrong approach anyway.
This is an important point. Where the System V TZ string, as extended by POSIX, really went off the rails is when implementations decided that they didn't need any way to represent the *installation* timezone. A portable program written for the only-TZ-in-environment paradigm must use UTC for all security-sensitive times; with TZ-in-the-filesystem, it can be certain of at least one secure local timezone in addition to UTC, if the host is correctly configured. (Perhaps it would be good if the next POSIX revision included some words in the rationale to this effect, suggesting that implementations not rely exclusively on the TZ environment variable.) -GAWollman