[Asterisk-Dev] Re: ast_localtime() weird interface.

[Tony Mountifield]

In article <20051011233741.B19609 at xorpc.icir.org>,
Luigi Rizzo <rizzo at icir.org> wrote:
> hi,
> i am trying to compile asterisk-current with -Werror to clean up
> compile errors, and amomg other things i hit a number of inconsistencies
> on the first argument of ast_localtime() (this on FreeBSD-6, but
> the problem may exist elsewhere depending on how time_t is defined).
> 
> Looking it up, i notice that ast_localtime has this interface:
> 
> 	struct tm *
> 	ast_localtime(timep, p_tm, zone)
> 	const time_t * const    timep;
> 	struct tm *p_tm;
> 	const char * const      zone;
> 
> and i wonder why the first argument is passed by name rather than
> by value.
> I see no reason for that,

I would think the reason is that it is designed to be as much as
possible a drop-in replacement for the standard localtime(3) or
localtime_r(3) functions, and they both take a pointer to a time_t as
their first argument:

struct tm *localtime(const time_t *timep);
struct tm *localtime_r(const time_t *timep, struct tm *result);

> and i'd like to change it, so that it is much easier to deal with the
> different definitions of time_t on the various platforms.

Since everyone who is familiar with the localtime functions would be
used to the existing case, I think such a change would be less
desirable.

What kind of problems are you encountering in dealing with the different
definitions of time_t?

Cheers
Tony
-- 
Tony Mountifield
Work: tony at softins.co.uk - http://www.softins.co.uk
Play: tony at mountifield.org - http://tony.mountifield.org