init and /etc/TIMEZONE (SCO ODT at least)

[Paul Ashton]

After a previous discussion and examining the man pages on TZ I noticed that
the standard installation time zone initialisation script /etc/tz placed the
line :-
TZ=GMT0BST-1,M3.5,M10.5
into /etc/TIMEZONE. According to the manual -1 is the default and there should
be a ";" seperator, so I changed the line to
TZ=GMT0BST;M3.5,M10.5
which worked (just the same as the original) and also satisfied my minimalist
philosophy :-)

On rebooting some days later after a power failure, the machine refused to go
to init level 2 complaining about getty's respawning too quickly, and then
hung. A few reboots later and I noticed that sysinit processes in inittab
aren't being spawned (such as bcheckrc), and also mapkey isn't executed, but
all of the inittab stages can be executed manually and the system is then
usable. 
...4 hours later after comparing init, login, boot track 0, /boot, checking
all permissions and /tcb stuff to the originals and then strings'ing init
and examining all the files it accesses, I remember changing /etc/TIMEZONE!!
I had commented out the original TZ and added the new one, so I flipped these
over. Still fails. Finally, delete the commented line and it works.
It turns out that if #TZ=anything is in /etc/TIMEZONE even though there are
plenty of other #'d out lines, init is completely clobbered.

Thought this might bite someone else out there some time...
-- 
Paul