strptime() in libc has a manpage error

[Brian Dessent]

Apologies for not using send-pr, however the freebsd.org mailserver will
not accept mail from the freebsd system that I have access to, because
it does not have a reverse DNS entry.  That aspect of DNS is out of my
control (and I've asked) so that leaves me with no way to use
'send-pr'.  I really wish your mailserver weren't so restrictive. 
Anyway...

The manpage for strptime(3) claims that "all conversion specifications
are identical to those described in strftime(3)".  strftime(3) claims to
support "%z", as follows:

-----
%z    is replaced by the time zone offset from UTC; a leading plus sign
   stands for east of UTC, a minus sign for west of UTC, hours and
   minutes follow with two digits each and no delimiter between them
   (common form for RFC 822 date headers).
-----

However, the code for strptime() contains no such conversion specifier,
and this manpage entry is just wrong.  You can easily verify this by
looking at the code for strptime:
<http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/lib/libc/stdtime/strptime.c?rev=1.34&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup>
which clearly has no provision to handle the "%z" case.

This can be demonstrated with the following perl command (which calls
the libc strptime() directly):

-----
$ perl -MTime::Piece -e \
 '$ts = Time::Piece->strptime("29/Sep/2003:17:19:55 -0700", 
               "%d/%b/%Y:%H:%M:%S %z"); print $ts->cdate;'
garbage at end of string in strptime: -0700 at
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.1/mach/Time/Piece.pm line 442.
Mon Sep 29 17:19:55 2003
-----

FreeBSD RELENG_4_8 i386, yadda yadda yadda

Lets just say that this has resulted in much hair pulling and cursing at
perl, only to discover that the FBSD manpage is flat out wrong.

Brian