Issues w/ timezones on gssftpd

[Russ Allbery]

Tom Yu <tlyu at MIT.EDU> writes:

> It's possible that, in addition to copying /etc/localtime, you may have
> to copy the entire contents of /usr/share/lib/zoneinfo or whatever the
> relevant set of database files is.  (assuming someone has set TZ to a
> value which causes lookups in the timezone database) I think POSIX also
> defines the value of TZ to override implementation-defined behavior,
> unless the value of TZ begins with a ":" character.

I can definitely see the benefit of not having to do this if it's as
simple as calling tzset before chroot.  I believe tzset is portable to any
Unix-like system (I could be wrong, but it would surprise me).

Calling tzset first won't help with forking subprocesses, but if that's
not involved, it's a fairly neat solution to the problem.

> I think it would be more correct to configure the chroot environment so
> that the OS can correctly handle the timezone.

I don't disagree with this, and certainly that would be more reliable, but
I can see the argument that people won't know to do this and it requires
some additional setup that could be avoided.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>