Mail Archives: djgpp/1997/04/18/01:30:41
In article <Pine DOT SUN DOT 3 DOT 91 DOT 970415115006 DOT 12996F-100000 AT is>, Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il> writes:
|>
|>On 14 Apr 1997, Ruiter de M wrote:
|>
|>> I have found, that, for EMACS to know my time zone, I _have_ to put my
|>> zoneinfo-files in C:/BIN/GCC/ZONEINFO.
|>
|>Thanks for the report. This is due to a bug in the library function
|>`tzset' (more accurately, in one of its internal subroutines): it
|>caches the value of the zoneinfo directory, ....
Given your explanation, Eli, I wouldn't categorise this as a bug in
tzset and friends - the implementation is a perfectly sensible one.
The timezone routines can get called millions of times by programs
that need to process date and time strings and caching info such as the
directory, and the zone files themselves, is the only way they can
offer acceptable performance. The problem is surely with EMACs and its
arcane method of building itself. There are no doubt other gotchas lurking
somewhere involving routines which maintain internal state.
The most sensible patch might be a single one to add a new function
to tell the tz routines to forget their internally-saved names, which
EMACS could call on startup. A patch like that might conceivably be
useful to very long-running programs as well, whose environment might
change around them. (Although in DOS, I'm not sure how this would happen.)
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Kevin Ashley K DOT Ashley AT Ulcc DOT ac DOT uk
Development Manager http://www.ulcc.ac.uk/staff/Kevin+Ashley
University of London Computer Centre. ...ukc!ncdlab!K.Ashley
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