it's not clear why I originally wrote O_NOFOLLOW into this; I suspect
the reason was with an aim of making the function more general for
mapping partially or fully untrusted files provided by the user.
however, the timezone code already precludes use of absolute or
relative pathnames in suid/sgid programs, and disallows .. in
pathnames which are relative to one of the system timezone locations,
so there is no threat of opening a symlink which is not trusted by
appropriate user. since some users may wish to put symbolic links in
the zoneinfo directories to alias timezones, it seems preferable to
allow this.
this commit has two major user-visible parts: zoneinfo-format time
zones are now supported, and overflow handling is intended to be
complete in the sense that all functions return a correct result if
and only if the result fits in the destination type, and otherwise
return an error. also, some noticable bugs in the way DST detection
and normalization worked have been fixed, and performance may be
better than before, but it has not been tested.
Rich Felker