* Paul Eggert: > Linus Torvalds wrote: >> I assume/think that glibc uses (a) environment >> variables and (b) a filesystem-set default (per-user file with a >> system-wide default? I don't know what people do).
> glibc relies on the TZ environment variable, with a system-wide > default specified in /etc/localtime or suchlike (there is no > per-user default). glibc ignores the kernel's 'struct timezone' > settings for of this, as 'struct timezone' is obsolete/vestigial and > doesn't contain enough info to do proper conversions anyway. I think the configuration value that settimeofday changes is not actually a time zone, but an time offset used to interpret various things, mostly in a dual-boot environment with Windows, apparently (Like the default time offset for extracting timetamps from FAT volumes.) This data has to come from *somewhere*. The TZ variable and /etc/localtime cover something else entirely. Maybe it is possible to replace these things with other mechanisms which exist today. For example, the mount program could read a configuration file to determine the system default for the time_offset mount option and apply the value automatically. The real-time clock offset could be maintained by whatever mechanism hwclock uses. I think whatever we end up doing, we should maintain consistency after a system upgrade after architectures. It does not make sense to keep using the settimeofday hack on amd64 indefinitely, and switch to a different mechanism on RV32, so that the two ways of supplying the offset are never reconciled across architectures.
