MSVCRT Update for DST?
[Update 2007-03-14 1:24pm] There's now an update to MSVCRT.DLL! Read all about it here, or go straight to the source and grab it.
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elieve it or not, I'm not the only software developer in my family--my wife, Cindy, has been writing software nearly as long as I have.She's working at a company that's still supporting some products with pretty old code bases. Many of the products deal with a lot of time-series data, and they have to deal with data from different timezones.
At least some of the code utilizes the mktime, tzset, localtime, and gmttime functions in the MSVC runtime library to help translate times and time zones.
As many of you have probably heard, Congress changed the dates for daylight saving time this year. As a smaller number of you have heard, Microsoft is updating their operating systems to reflect these changes. They're also updating their newer development tools. However, it's not clear what's happening for their older customers. This page says this:
For customers who rely on the TZ environment variable for the DST information, they will get outdated DST information for 2007 and beyond (i.e., they will get DST information according to the previous system). Microsoft is currently working on a fix for this issue and will post information about its availability on the Visual Studio Support page. In the interim, developers are advised to test their applications to determine the impact of the DST update on their applications.Wow. Ok, she's tested their applications--the old mktime functions are definitely not going to work this year. Now what? This is less than a month away, Microsoft--is this release coming sometime soon?
I know Microsoft can't support old products forever. On the other hand, they know that people make a commitment to their platform, and many people can't force their customers to upgrade software. It's also not like releasing a new MSVCRT.DLL would be a huge deal--they released a DST bug fix a few years ago.
So, all you Microsofties out there: any word on this?
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