I cannot be sure that my customers will install the necessary timezone support files. Therefore, any copy of ctime linked into my programs must work "correctly" when transported to a machine without /etc/zoneinfo in place.

Neither can you be sure that they will install /etc/passwd. You don't handle that, why handle this? Not that I think that defaulting to GMT is correct, I don't. However, I can trivially fix it so that worst case is off by an hour. Which seems sufficient.

I insist that both timezone and DST corrections be applied, even in the absence of /etc/zoneinfo, which means that ctime must carry some DST information along in its data segment, so it can perform at least as well as it used to.

This is unclear to me.

The next question is, should any DST information hard-compiled into ctime be fixed to reflect recent changes? The surprising answer is "no."

That means that your worst case is off by an hour. (Ignoring double DST.) The same as 4.3's. What am I missing? --keith

Steve Summit stevesu@copper.tek.com