TZ Rationalization Requested

[Guy Harris]

> ?  I thought the convention on USG UNIXes was to set TZ in one of the
> rc files so that it would be in everyone's environment.

Unfortunately, setting it in an rc file doesn't do any good for processes
run directly out of /etc/inittab, like "getty".

> MY complaint about all this is that the Berkeley kernel does not
> supply the timezone name (CST, CDT, etc.).  Otherwise their system call
> seems like a good idea, provided that TZ in the environment is allowed
> to override the system timezone for those rare cases where that is
> useful.

In the US I don't think this is a problem, as the offset from GMT uniquely
identifies the time zone (although there may be weird exceptions), but
the V7 scheme of having an offset-to-timezone-name table may break elsewhere;
I remember seeing a claim in net.mail.somethingorother that European
countries give the same zone different names because they want the name to
make sense in their native languages.  If this is the case, the V7 scheme
is OK in the US but the name would have to be supplied independently, such
as with a system call.  I guess the implementors, who lived in the US,
figured that the time zone name was redundant information and should be
computed from the offset.

	Guy Harris
	{seismo,ihnp4,allegra}!rlgvax!guy