I’ve been doing some FreeSWITCH config maintenance.
I noticed that timezones hadn’t been updated in a while, so I ran timezone-gen.pl. It looks like a more recent update converts characters like < and > to HTML entities. I thought hmmm maybe this is how it works… but it don’t. I mean I looked at the code and it didn’t seem like that, but I’m also not a C-champ.
<zone name="Etc/GMT+5" value="<GMT+5>5" />
<zone name="Etc/GMT+0" value="GMT0" />
freeswitch@drthunder> strftime_tz Etc/GMT+5
2023-08-18 06:59:14
freeswitch@drthunder> strftime_tz Etc/GMT+0
2023-08-18 06:59:16
What da!
Ok, let’s remix this
<zone name="Etc/GMT+5" value="<GMT+5>5" />
<zone name="Etc/GMT+0" value="GMT0" />
SPOILER
freeswitch@drthunder> strftime_tz Etc/GMT+5
2023-08-18 07:03:08
freeswitch@drthunder> strftime_tz Etc/GMT+0
2023-08-18 07:03:11
It would seem that something has changed in the way the timezone strings are produced. The amount of timezone strings that look like <-03>3 are only increasing.
Is it time to do like Asterisk and just include localtime.c from tzdb? What is the development cost to fund something like this? I wonder if it’s even worth it - I mostly work with people in the US, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility that I’ll be working with companies in South America where I’m seeing more of these < timezones.