[Freemint-discuss] Mint handling of file timestamps

[Thorsten O. <ad...@th...>]

Hi,

when tracking down what occurs to me as a bug in aranym's implementation of 
the hostfs, it turned out be a general problem in mint.

When setting/retrieving timestamps (either through Fstat64(), or Fdatime(), or 
some Fcntl(FUTIME)), at certain places the kernel timezone variable is added/
subtracted. That is totally nonsense of course, that timezone offset is only 
valid for the current local time, but not for some arbitrary time in the past. 
if works when used on just created files, but not eg. when copying files from a 
TOS partition (which is expected to use local doslike timestamps) to an 
extf2fs filesystem, or in my case to the hostfs which behaves the same in this 
manner (it has the FS_EXT_3 flag set, and uses UTC timestamps).

To fix this, Mint must be able to compute the timezone offset for some given 
local time, which basically means implementing most of the tz package as 
already used by eg. mintlib. Main problem with this is that it relies on some 
database which is stored on a filesystem... Not only that this leads to an 
chicken/egg problem, but it would also make calculating the correct offset 
awfully slow. Any ideas how to solve this?