TZ

[John Drabik]

On Mon, 20 Mar 2000 10:40:37 -0400 (AST), Trevor Smith wrote:

>On Mon, 20 Mar 2000 09:42:20 +0000 (GMT), Simon Bowring wrote:
>
>>Since a great many Linux PC users do host another OS on the same machine,...

>Let's not any of us fall into the trap of making generic claims we.....

>More importantly that vast majority of linux machines, if you believe the
>computer magazines, are NOT home users but, instead, servers and
>other business machines.

And, to quote you: "Let's not any of us fall into the trap of making
generic claims..."

I am beginning to see Linux pop up in a lot of homes.  Many of them
do NOT have two operating systems.  Most of them, that I see are
running Caldera (which gives GMT/local time as an install option), or
RedHat.  A few Debian machines in businesses, but I've heard they are
hard to setup.  While at CeBit recently, I was given a copy of SuSE
Linux (which is very big in Europe); I haven't installed it yet (I
have a test machine for just such purposes - but haven't had the time
yet), so I don't know about the time settings there.

All of which, of course, is completely immaterial.  DOS, OS/2, and
Doze, for better or worse (actually, for worse), don't use TZ
correctly.  That's that.  Fixing libraries isn't going to change that
for existing applications.  But there is one possibility....

Programs, such as OD or others, can have a "sensitivity" list (I
think DragText does that too).  These are programs that are known to
have problems with interactions.  If that intelligence could be added
to a new clock driver, with a list of "compatible" apps, the driver
could return GMT, otherwise, local time.  Granted, this would be a
royal pain in the patoot, and the program list could be quite long
(and prone to errors at first).  Short of that, I just don't see any
way out of this.  Maybe Warp 5 will finally take care of it, but
then, what about existing apps?  What about DOS and Doze apps under
OS/2?  What about .... 

John