timezone: long vs char*

[Garrett Wollman]

<<On Sun, 08 Nov 2009 19:41:03 -0500, "Joseph S. Atkinson" <jsa.bsd at gmail.com> said:

> Hello. I was working on bringing audio/liboggz up to date in ports, but hit a 
> snag. liboggz expects timezone information to be long, which is (I am told) in 
> accordance with SUSv3. FreeBSD is appears to be returning char*.

> I asked about this in #bsdports and was told that it appears that FreeBSD is 
> wrong in this case and should be fixed. I saw no mention of this as a known 
> issue on the standards webpage.

I think the people on "#bsdports" (an IRC channel, I assume) are
wrong.  FreeBSD has never targeted conformance to any version of SUS,
which memorializes a large number of UNIX System V's historic
mistakes.  We do target conformance to POSIX (IEEE Std. 1003.1-2008 is
the current version).

In the POSIX specification, the declarations of "timezone" and
"daylight" in <time.h> are flagged as "XSI", meaning that they are
part of the X/Open System Interfaces extension, which in turn means
that they are part of SUS but not POSIX.

-GAWollman