[PING^2] RFC [PATCH] BZ#1077902: New API gettimezone

[Paul Eggert]

On 04/30/2014 08:49 AM, P J P wrote:
> It sounds more of incorrect or buggy time zone file.

No, that time zone file is not buggy.  It's generated by the standard 
tzdata distribution, it uses the documented file layout, and many other 
time zone files are like it.  For details, please see the tzfile man page.

> TZ variable provides offsets which are added to the UTC times to get 
> the local time, right?

That's basically right.  (TZ also can provide leap-second info, which 
maps TAI to UTC, but let's ignore that for now.)

> Goal is to make local system time zone definition available to 
> processes running inside of a chroot(2) jail; On the same host.

Sorry, that point was never made clear to me.  In that case, please let 
me rephrase my remark, as follows:

I'm afraid no other option is available or possible under reasonable 
constraints, if the goal is to have gmtime->localtime conversion in the 
chrooted jail exactly match gmtime->localtime conversion with TZ unset 
outside the jail regardless of whether the jail and the main host have 
identical tz files.

One way to work around the problem is to arrange for chrooted jail to 
have identical tz files as the main host.  That is necessary anyway, if 
you want gmtime->localtime mappings to match no matter how applications 
set TZ.  This sort of thing is standard practice for chrooted jails: one 
must set up configuration files, shared libraries, etc. to be the same 
in the jail as in the main host, and the tz files are just another part 
of this.