Re: syslog() always sends GMT timestamps

[Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>]

On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 07:39:38PM +0800, orc wrote:
> In syslog() there is a call to gmtime_r() instead of localtime_r()
> which applies timezone offset. Logs are being collected with GMT
> timestamps which is a bit misleading.

The standard doesn't specify whether these timestamps are local or
gmt, and does not allow modifying the global state that localtime
modifies and which localtime_r is also allowed to modify. POSIX allows
localtime_r not to modify this global state, but making such an
implementation is non-trivial. And moreover, since POSIX does not
specify syslog to access the TZ variable, accessing it would make
syslog non-safe with respect to modifying TZ from other threads, which
is probably non-conforming. These are the technical reasons I made
musl's syslog use gmt.

Aside from that, I just think it's a bad idea to put local time in the
syslog, since different processes writing to syslog might have
different timezones set, leading to confusingly interleaved timestamps
that are hard to make sense of. Others may disagree on this (it's a
policy matter rather than a technical one) but it was probably part of
my motivation too.

Rich