On Tue, 14 Apr 1998, Colin Wood wrote:

> Michael G. Schabert wrote:
> > >:-)  Of course, what happens to the poor schmuck in Antarctica who
> > >installs NetBSD on his machine and finds that he can't find the
> > >appropriate timezone files?
> > 
> > But _why_ do we need so many darn files when there are exactly 24 time
> > zones????? Even if we had 24 "regular" and 24 "DST" it would be much easier.
> 
> You would think that there are only 24 timezones, but there aren't.  Due
> to the brilliance of local governments, there are quite a few oddities out
> there.  For example, in the US, I don't think that Arizona obeys DST, so

Arizona (or maybe just Phoenix?) and part of Indiana... the part that's in
Eastern time, I think....  Still, if there were 48, 24 of which had a
daylight savings shift and 24 of which didn't -- which I think was the
original suggestion, right? -- that would cover all but the strangest
(i.e. changing on a different day or whatever)....  It seems to me that 49
files for Europe alone is, in all likelihood, severe overkill.

Where I disagree with you is when you say that they're all necessary.... 
There's a separate entry for Los Angeles... since when is LA not in
Pacific time?  And Chicago (Central)... and Louisville (Central)... New
York, Detroit, Boise, Denver... the list goes on.  Maybe a couple of those
cities have something weird about their time zones, but most of the files
are identical to a file in US (frequently hard links, even).  That's not
counting America/Indianapolis and America/Indiana/Indianapolis.  The fact
that many of them are hard links keeps them from taking up space, but they
still waste lots of install time for no apparent reason.

> it needs a separate one.  All of Russia is one hour behind normal
> timezones IIRC.  There are a number of other little exceptions here and
> there :-)

That means the Russian zones still qualify as an offset of a given number
of hours from GMT (with or w/o DST, whatever).


Thoughts?
David

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GCS/CC/FA/H/L/MC/M/MU/PA/TW d-@ s:>- a-- C++++>$ UBLAS*++++>$
P+?>$ L+++>$ !E--- W+++>$ N++(+++)>+++$ !o? K-? !w--- !O
M++>$ !V-- PS+>$ !PE- Y+>$ PGP+>$ t+++>$ 5+>++++$ !X- !R tv+>$
b++>$ !DI !D- G++(+++)>$ e>++++ h--! r--- !y-
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------