On Wed, Oct 03 2012, Jani Nikula wrote: > On Tue, 25 Sep 2012, Michal Sojka <sojkam1@fel.cvut.cz> wrote: >> This patch reworks date/time parser library test program to make it >> easier to to write the actual tests. It also modifies the notmuch test >> script and adds several new tests to it. > [...] >> case 'n': >> - /* specify now in seconds since epoch */ >> - now = (time_t) strtol (optarg, NULL, 10); >> + memset (&tm, 0, sizeof (tm)); >> + char *parsed = strptime (optarg, format, &tm); > > One of the problems with strptime is that it doesn't support time zones, > which is why I chose not to use it here. (You can specify %z in the > format to ignore it, but it looks like it's ignored no matter > what. *shrug*) Combined with mktime below, you introduce possible TZ and > DST variations in the tests, which can be problematic. So perhaps we > should keep the reference time as a timestamp here. I didn't pay much attention to time zone issues when writing this little program, so you might be true. But note that test-lib.sh sets TZ=UTC and I hope that this should eliminate the problems. I think that it is better to have human understandable values in test scripts. -Michal