Re: Conversation with Ron Tolley

I also think going to a new environment variable such as ZONE (I'd rather see it called TIMEZONE) is the best choice; there's nothing to prevent the system from defining both TZ (for upward compatbility) and TIMEZONE (for new software which checks for it first.) I think that any standard that requires that TZ do anything may be a mistake; if the standard says that a missing TZ means something, then any upward compatible future standard based on another variable will lose big. It would be best if comments about what to do if TZ is missing were made in such a way that they are just a fallback, not a way for a program to get a guaranteed behavior. Mark