> I notice that when looking in the sparc kernel config files, they all
> have the TIMEZONE and DST options marked as obsolete..  however, you
> can't compile a kernel without them [...]

This aspect of it should probably be sent-pr; they should probably
default to 0 if the options are not defined.

> Are they really obsolete?

For the SPARC, they are.  Their only use, as far as I can tell, is when
the hardware is shared with some other operating system that likes to
keep the hardware time-of-day clock in a timezone other than UTC,
typically local time.  The only OS that the SPARC port has to share
hardware with, though, is SunOS, and it too keeps the hardware in UTC,
so for the SPARC's purposes, the options are obsolete.

> I can't quite work that out though (I thought it was all done in
> /etc/localtime but that might come later)

Almost.  settimeofday()/gettimeofday() work in UTC, but if the hardware
doesn't run in UTC the kernel has to know how much to offset by.

					der Mouse

			    mouse@collatz.mcrcim.mcgill.edu