On Tue, 23 May 2000, Andy Mell wrote:
> But there is a point to the TZ variable - it is for users on one system
> who are geographically dispersed. What if the user wants the mail to be
> sent with timezone and the time in the headers set according to the user's
> locality. I could for example, be sending email from a system in Cambridge
> but be physically in New York - I may well not want the email to have
> Cambridge local time stamped on it.
Fine. That is your MUA's job when it creates the Date: line. No problem.
> Why should it use system local time in particular? If its a problem for
> logging, surely TZ can be subtracted so that the logs show system local
> time but the email has the user local time stamped on it.
There are sysadmins (I am one) who want the times in Exim's log files to
be in the local wallclock time, and I expect *all* sysadmins want all
the times in the logs to be in the same timezone. If Exim does not stamp
on the TZ variable, and a user submits a message with TZ set to
something exotic, the logged "message arrived" time is in the wrong
timezone. [I don't care as much about the time in the Received: line, as
long as it has the GMT offset correctly given.]
If you can tell me how to "subtract TZ" then I will implement it. I keep
asking this question; nobody has ever given an answer that really works.
The closest I have come is to kill the environment, but even that works
only on some OS (the others revert to GMT, not wallclock time). Sigh.
There is now an option to force all times on the logs to UTC (i.e. GMT)
but not all sysadmins want this. We don't - all our other logs use local
time and we do not want Exim's logs to be different.
Hmm. I've just had an idea. Why don't I implement an Exim option called
"tz" which allows you to set the TZ variable for use inside Exim? It
could default to whatever TZ is set to when Exim is built. That would
fit in with a recent suggestion about building a specific environment
for use inside Exim.
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
