1$OpenBSD: README,v 1.7 2008/03/31 14:16:53 millert Exp $ 2@(#)README 8.2 3 4"What time is it?" -- Richard Deacon as The King 5"Any time you want it to be." -- Frank Baxter as The Scientist 6 (from the Bell System film "About Time") 7 8The 1989 update of the time zone package featured 9 10* POSIXization (including interpretation of POSIX-style TZ environment 11 variables, provided by Guy Harris), 12* ANSIfication (including versions of "mktime" and "difftime"), 13* SVIDulation (an "altzone" variable) 14* MACHination (the "gtime" function) 15* corrections to some time zone data (including corrections to the rules 16 for Great Britain and New Zealand) 17* reference data from the United States Naval Observatory for folks who 18 want to do additional time zones 19* and the 1989 data for Saudi Arabia. 20 21(Since this code will be treated as "part of the implementation" in some places 22and as "part of the application" in others, there's no good way to name 23functions, such as timegm, that are not part of the proposed ANSI C standard; 24such functions have kept their old, underscore-free names in this update.) 25 26And the "dysize" function has disappeared; it was present to allow compilation 27of the "date" command on old BSD systems, and a version of "date" is now 28provided in the package. The "date" command is not created when you "make all" 29since it may lack options provided by the version distributed with your 30operating system, or may not interact with the system in the same way the 31native version does. 32 33Since POSIX frowns on correct leap second handling, the default behavior of 34the "zic" command (in the absence of a "-L" option) has been changed to omit 35leap second information from its output files. 36 37Here is a recipe for acquiring, building, installing, and testing the 38tz distribution on a GNU/Linux or similar host. 39 40 mkdir tz 41 cd tz 42 wget 'ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tz*.tar.gz' 43 gzip -dc tzcode*.tar.gz | tar -xf - 44 gzip -dc tzdata*.tar.gz | tar -xf - 45 46Be sure to read the comments in "Makefile" and make any changes needed 47to make things right for your system, especially if you are using some 48platform other than GNU/Linux. Then run the following commands, 49substituting your desired installation directory for "$HOME/tzdir": 50 51 make TOPDIR=$HOME/tzdir install 52 $HOME/tzdir/etc/zdump -v America/Los_Angeles 53 54To use the new functions, use a "-ltz" option when compiling or linking. 55 56Historical local time information has been included here to: 57 58* provide a compendium of data about the history of civil time 59 that is useful even if the data are not 100% accurate; 60 61* give an idea of the variety of local time rules that have 62 existed in the past and thus an idea of the variety that may be 63 expected in the future; 64 65* provide a test of the generality of the local time rule description 66 system. 67 68The information in the time zone data files is by no means authoritative; 69the files currently do not even attempt to cover all time stamps before 701970, and there are undoubtedly errors even for time stamps since 1970. 71If you know that the rules are different from those in a file, by all means 72feel free to change file (and please send the changed version to 73tz@elsie.nci.nih.gov for use in the future). Europeans take note! 74 75Thanks to these Timezone Caballeros who've made major contributions to the 76time conversion package: Keith Bostic; Bob Devine; Paul Eggert; Robert Elz; 77Guy Harris; Mark Horton; John Mackin; and Bradley White. Thanks also to 78Michael Bloom, Art Neilson, Stephen Prince, John Sovereign, and Frank Wales 79for testing work, and to Gwillim Law for checking local mean time data. 80None of them are responsible for remaining errors. 81 82Look in the ~ftp/pub directory of elsie.nci.nih.gov 83for updated versions of these files. 84 85Please send comments or information to tz@elsie.nci.nih.gov. 86