Re: [Exim] Timezone Problems

Philip Hazel wrote:

> $ (TZ=GMT; date)
> Mon Oct 14 09:31:56 GMT 2002          <= this is correct GMT
> $ (TZ=GMT+2; date)
> Mon Oct 14 07:33:05 GMT 2002
> $ (TZ=GMT-2; date)
> Mon Oct 14 11:33:19 GMT 2002

The three letters are not the "offset from", but the timezone abbreviation,
and just used while reporting time later, so you can say
$TZ=ZZZ-2
if you like.

> That suggests to me that Sun have got their naming conventions
> "backwards", but it is easy to get confused by these timezone things,
> so maybe I'm just confused.

Sun does, in a way, and IIRC, so did the AT&T unixes. The problem was a
common one in India in the late 80's to catch would-be SysAdms, the
conventional wisdom was that the Unix guys had, being in New York, set up
the offset to be positive _west_ of Greenwich, so us eastern guys had to be
negative offsets.

For bonus marks, figure out the appropriate offset for India, which is
5hrs30min offset, ie, not a whole number. As late as Solaris 2.3, it was
not possible to specify a fractional offset in the installer, so we
installed with an offset of IST-5 and manually teaked it later.

--
Sanjeev Gupta
Linux MVP brainbench.com