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- @(#)README 7.8
-
- "What time is it?" -- Richard Deacon as The King
- "Any time you want it to be." -- Frank Baxter as The Scientist
- (from the Bell System film on time)
-
- The 1989 update of the time zone package featured
-
- * POSIXization (including interpretation of POSIX-style TZ environment
- variables, provided by Guy Harris),
- * ANSIfication (including versions of "mktime" and "difftime"),
- * SVIDulation (an "altzone" variable)
- * MACHination (the "gtime" function)
- * corrections to some time zone data (including corrections to the rules
- for Great Britain and New Zealand)
- * reference data from the United States Naval Observatory for folks who
- want to do additional time zones
- * and the 1989 data for Saudi Arabia.
-
- (Since this code will be treated as "part of the implementation" in some places
- and as "part of the application" in others, there's no good way to name
- functions, such as timegm, that are not part of the proposed ANSI C standard;
- such functions have kept their old, underscore-free names in this update.)
-
- And the "dysize" function has disappeared; it was present to allow compilation
- of the "date" command on old BSD systems, and a version of "date" is now
- provided in the package. The "date" command is not created when you "make all"
- since it may lack options provided by the version distributed with your
- operating system, or may not interact with the system in the same way the
- native version does.
-
- Since POSIX frowns on correct leap second handling, the default behavior of
- the "zic" command (in the absence of a "-L" option) has been changed to omit
- leap second information from its output files.
-
- Be sure to read the comments in "Makefile" and make any changes
- needed to make things right for your system.
-
- To use the new functions, use a "-lz" option when compiling or linking.
-
- Historical local time information has been included here not because it
- is particularly useful, but rather to:
-
- * give an idea of the variety of local time rules that have
- existed in the past and thus an idea of the variety that may be
- expected in the future;
-
- * provide a test of the generality of the local time rule description
- system.
-
- The information in the time zone data files is by no means authoritative;
- if you know that the rules are different from those in a file, by all means
- feel free to change file (and please send the changed version to
- tz@elsie.nci.nih.gov for use in the future). Europeans take note!
-
- Thanks to these Timezone Caballeros who've made major contributions to the
- time conversion package: Keith Bostic; Bob Devine; Paul Eggert; Robert Elz;
- Guy Harris; Mark Horton; John Mackin; and Bradley White. Thanks also to
- Michael Bloom, Art Neilson, Stephen Prince, John Sovereign, and Frank Wales
- for testing work, and to Gwillim Law for checking local mean time data.
- None of them are responsible for remaining errors.
-
- Look in the ~ftp/pub directory of elsie.nci.nih.gov
- for updated versions of these files.
-
- Please send comments or information to tz@elsie.nci.nih.gov.
-