Date: Tue, 15 Apr 1997 11:50:57 +0300 (IDT)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To: Ruiter de M <mdruiter AT cs DOT vu DOT nl>
cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: Zoneinfo bug in EMACS? (Eli?)
In-Reply-To: <5it9vs$nc2@star.cs.vu.nl>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.970415115006.12996F-100000@is>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII


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, and the value Emacs sees
when it is built (``dumped'') winds up in the executable and is then
reused instead of initializing the directory name from the TZ variable
at run time.

> In addition, I found the string `TZDIR'. I presume this is a
> environment-variable that can be set, but I tried it and couldn't make
> it work.

The same bug prevents TZDIR from working: TZDIR is only looked up when
the name of the zoneinfo directory isn't already known, but in dumped
Emacs that name is set from the build time, and therefore TZDIR on
your machine is ignored.

> Don't tell me I heva to recompile EMACS, because I like precompiled
> binaries very much. I can't do much wrong myself with those.

There's no way to work around this but to rebuild Emacs with patched
library functions.  Sorry.