Building phobos with wine fails

[Shachar Shemesh via Digitalmars-d]

On 03/07/17 16:59, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d wrote:

> 1. The functions for converting to and from a timezone take a struct
> containing information about what that timezone is - including the DST
> switches. The way that MS did that orginally involved specifying something
> like the nth instance of the xth day of the week in a particular month (e.g.
> the first Sunday in April), and that was for all time, as if time zones
> never changed when they have DST switches - which of course, doesn't work
> well for many timezones (there's even a wikipedia article on how Windows
> kept having the time wrong in Israel because of this). MS didn't bother to
> fix this until the US and Canada changed when DST was going to be starting
> in 2007.

Considering that wikipedia article used to link to *my* site for how to 
fix this, I think I safely say "I know".

In fact, MS used to link to my site for a solution, which hilarious, 
because by "my site", I mean "my company", which was named "Lingnu Open 
Source Consulting Ltd.".

> Without that change, you end up using the old DST rules,
> and last time I checked, wine had not made that change. So, if you used the
> old functions (which IIRC, std.datetime does, because at the time it was
> written, we were trying to support Windows XP), and you use wine, then DST
> will be wrong for some dates which would be correct on Windows.

Sounds easy enough to both create a unit test and fix. Let's see if 
Alexandre will take my patches after so many years[1] :-).

> 
> 2. The time zone conversion stuff in Windows is unfortunately defined in the
> registry, and AFAIK, the only way to look up an arbitrary time zone instead
> of using local time or UTC is to read in the information from the registry
> and fill in the aforementioned struct with time zone information with that
> information. The time zones are listed in the registry based on the English
> names that MS uses - e.g. "Pacific Standard Time" is what they use for the
> Pacific time zone (though it has both the standard time and DST information
> in there). Pretty much every other OS uses the time zone database for their
> time zone information, and that uses major cities to distinguish time zones
> (e.g. the Pacific time zone would be "America/Los_Angeles"), not something
> like "Pacific Standard Time". wine chose to use the time zone database names
> like "America/Los_Angeles" in their registry instead of the names that
> Windows uses

That one sounds like potentially harder to fix. I'll ask on the wine 
lists and see if anything comes up.

Also, note that even if I submit patches, and they get merged, it's 
around a year until major distributions pick that up.

Still, better late than never.

Shachar

1 - By which I mean that maybe, after so many years, he now will.