[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] TZ environment variable in desktop application

[From: Simon Budig]

Simon Budig (simon at budig.de) wrote:
> For some reason the TZ environment variable is set inside the
> maemo_af_desktop application (which is the process the statusbar applets
> run in). Unfortunately it seems to be set to a nonsensical value (for me
> it was something like "8#\x14A", where \x14 stands for chr(0x14)) which
> gets interpreted as "GMT" by functions like localtime() etc.

Debugging without sourcecode is so much fun. I today tried disabling the
various plugins after Tommi Kommulainen confirmed to me some time ago on
IRC that the desktop application itself does not mess with TZ.

I am pretty certain now that the guilty plugin is the Mail plugin for
the navigator, since disabling all home-plugins and all navigator
plugins by chmod-000ing them results in an unset TZ variable and
enabling libtn_mail_plugin.so again results in the broken TZ value
again.

Hmm, when the RSS home plugin has been activated once the same problem
happens as well. As soon as it gets enabled for the first time TZ gets
set to the bogus value.

Also noteworthy is, that osso_system_note_infoprint() stops working when
the home-clock is active but TZ has not been set by either the
mail_plugin or the rss-home-applet. There is something very weird going
on there.

I really wonder what the home-clock does to determine the current time.

The related bug report is #225:
   https://maemo.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=225

I'd appreciate if some Nokian would have a look into this. The hack I
have to do in the panelclock to work around this annoys me.

BTW: I used a debug build of the panelclock to determine the value of TZ:
http://www.home.unix-ag.org/simon/files/n770/panelclock_0.4_arm_tzdebug.deb

If TZ is set, a click on the clock shows its value - otherwise it shows
the current date.

I can recommend testing this with the charger plugged in - this
drastically reduces the time to restart the desktop  :)

Dis/enabling the plugins was done via chmod 000 / chmod 644.

Thanks for any hints,
       Simon
-- 
              simon at budig.de              http://simon.budig.de/