Mail Archives: djgpp/1994/08/31/14:02:16
> My intention with the routine I posted was not to replace tzset(), but
> rather to provide a means for being able to handle incomplete TZ
> specifica- tions, even when the zoneinfo files are missing. As Greg
> Roelofs has been telling us over the past days, you cannot expect
> people who just want to use zip/unzip (or any other DJGPP-compiled
> application) to install 300K of support files for DJGPP timezone
> handling.
That is way overstated. All that is really necessary is to include the
instructions for creating a correct, fully specified TZ entry in your
utilities' installation document, and then to have the utilities check
that the TZ entry is parsable, and fail with a usage-like message that
points the user back to the installation manual if it is not.
MS-DOS users drown in environmental settings necessary to make products
work, they wouldn't be offended if your utilities also required just
one or two. And in fact, I think in particular the *zip utilities
normally require the user to have put in an environmental variable for
the temporary file anyway, so the user would already be involved in an
autoexec.bat editing to get such products to work.
If the djgpp code correctly handles time zone conversions <--> GMT,
when given correct and complete Posix TZ entry information, that is
sufficient. The rest of the problem is a documentation problem, not a
programming problem, and it should be left to rest.
The whole _purpose_ of standards is to let the programmer know when the
task has been done sufficiently well, which is when its operation is in
conformance with the standard. Making the task bulletproof against the
efforts of users ignorant of the standard is excess effort spent in the
wrong endeavor. However much harder and more unpleasant it is for
programmers to write clear, unambiguous user documentation than to
write code, nevertheless, it is there, and not in the code, that
non-standard environment problems should be solved.
How about if someone fetches and posts the complete description for the
Posix TZ environmental variable so everyone can put a clearly written
version of it into their product documentation, and we let the chief
coder here, DJ, get on with more important work?
Xanthian.
--
Kent, the man from xanth.
Kent Paul Dolan, CSC contractor at Fleet Numerical. (408) 656-4363.
(Navy Unix email: ) (Navy cc:Mail email: ) (real world email: )
<dolan AT fnoc DOT navy DOT mil> <dolank AT fnoc DOT navy DOT mil> <xanthian AT well DOT sf DOT ca DOT us>
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