File times (was: Zoo and Timezones)

[Johan Vromans]

>From article <13152 at steinmetz.ge.com>, by davidsen at steinmetz.ge.com (William E. Davidsen Jr):
} In article <2884 at mhres.mh.nl> jv at mhres.mh.nl (Johan Vromans) writes:
} | A file created at 12:00 GMT will have its time stamped 12:00 GMT
} | whatever timezone it was created, archived or extracted.
} | File times are stored internally relative to GMT. When stored
} | this way, they should be retrieved this way. No need to change it.
} 
}   I don't understand this comment at all. Files are stored internally
} *where* as GMT? The only o/s which does this (as far as I know) is UNIX,
} and zoo runs on seven other o/s flavors.

Incorporating timezones always yields problems like these.
You can store the local time of a file, and restore it to local
time. Or you can incorporate timezones and adjust the local time
to a uniform timeframe (e.g. GMT). SInce most systems do not know
about timezones (e.g. MSDOS, VMS), it were better for a real
good exchangeable archiving program like zoo to ignore timezones,
store local times only, and document that it is done this way.

>From article <5746 at bsu-cs.UUCP>, by dhesi at bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi):
} The intent was to have all timezones represented as seconds west of
} GMT, up to a maximum of 24*60*60 seconds.  So if you are 1 hour east of
} GMT, you are also 23 hours west of GMT.  If there is a bug related to
} this, it probably involves a missing 1-day adjustment for sites east of
} GMT and west of the International Date Line.

Yes it does. +23 hours is not equivalent to -1 hour, it differs
one day.

} >File times [should be] stored internally relative to GMT.  When stored
} >this way, they should be retrieved this way. No need to change it.
} 
} The main problem with doing this is that not all operating systems
} maintain information about where they are relative to GMT.  Most users
} don't even *know* how far they are from GMT.

I would suggest the following:

 a. allow for timezones east of GMT. The way the information is
    currently stored is ok, but it needs to be interpreted as a
    signed character instead.

 b. add a command line option to have zoo ignore timezone
    information (as if it were compiled without GETTZ).
-- 
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