Subject: Re: Change time for /etc/daily
To: None <tech-misc@NetBSD.ORG>
From: der Mouse <mouse@Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA>
List: tech-misc
Date: 10/26/1997 06:46:11
> this night, we, French people, had the opportunity to spleep one more
> hour because we switched from daylight saving time to winter time.
> So, at 3 o' clock in the morning, it was 2 o' clock again.

Something similar happened here in Canada, too, though the time of the
changeover was slightly different:

	% date -r 877845599
	Sun Oct 26 01:59:59 EDT 1997
	% date -r 877845600
	Sun Oct 26 01:00:00 EST 1997

> That's no big deal but I think most European countries have the same
> problem and it would be great if the standard /etc/daily was run at
> another time, say 1 o' clock.

Anytime >=01:00 and <02:00 would cause the very same problem for most
of North America.

I think a better fix would be to arrange for cron to avoid running jobs
twice - whenever it sees local time step backwards, it doesn't run
anything until local time catches up to what it was.  (Of course, it
should not do this if the system time - the time_t time - did a
backwards step too; it should do this only if time_t time is monotonic
increasing but local time steps backwards.)

One could argue it should also run a pile of jobs as fast as it can
when it sees time step forwards, so as to avoid jobs not getting run
when stepping in the other direction.

For 1.3, I'm not sure - it's unlikely cron will get fixed, so perhaps
we should just move daily to 03:30 or something?

					der Mouse

			       mouse@rodents.montreal.qc.ca
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