The situation on the Apple II is rather special: There are several types of RTCs. It's not desirable to have specific code for all of them. As the OS supports file timestamps RTC owners usually use OS drivers for their RTC. Those drivers read the RTC and write the result in a "date/time location" in RAM. The OS reads the date/time from the RAM location. If there's no RTC the RAM location keeps containing zeros. The OS uses those zeros as timestamps and the files show up in a directory as "<NO DATE>".
There's no common interface to set RTCs so if an RTC _IS_ present there's just nothing to do. However, if there's _NO_ RTC present the user might very well be interest to "manually" set the RAM location in order to have timestamps. But he surely doesn't want to manually set the RAM location over an over again. Rather he wants to set it just once after booting the OS.
From that perspective it makes most sense to not set both the date and the time but rather only set the date and have the time just stay zero. Then files show up in a directory as "DD-MON-YY 0:00".
So clock_settime() checks if the current time equals 0:00. If it does _NOT_ then an RTC is supposed to be active and clock_settime() fails with ERANGE. Otherwise clock_settime() ignores sets the date - and completely ignores the time provided as parameter.
clock_getres() too checks if the current time equals 0:00. If it does _NOT_ then an RTC is supposed to be active and clock_getres() returns a time resolution of one minute. Otherwise clock_getres() presumes that the only one who sets the RAM location is clock_settime() and therefore returns a time resolution of one day.
We want to add the capability to not only get the time but also set the time, but there's no "setter" for the "getter" time().
The first ones that come into mind are gettimeofday() and settimeofday(). However, they take a struct timezone argument that doesn't make sense - even the man pages says "The use of the timezone structure is obsolete; the tz argument should normally be specified as NULL." And POSIX says "Applications should use the clock_gettime() function instead of the obsolescent gettimeofday() function."
The ...timeofday() functions work with microseconds while the clock_...time() functions work with nanoseconds. Given that we expect our targets to support only 1/10 of seconds the microseconds look preferable at first sight. However, already microseconds require the cc65 data type 'long' so it's not such a relevant difference to nanoseconds. Additionally clock_getres() seems useful.
In order to avoid code duplication clock_gettime() takes over the role of the actual time getter from _systime(). So time() now calls clock_gettime() instead of _systime().
For some reason beyond my understanding _systime() was mentioned in time.h. _systime() worked exactly like e.g. _sysremove() and those _sys...() functions are all considered internal. The only reason I could see would be a performance gain of bypassing the time() wrapper. However, all known _systime() implementations internally called mktime(). And mktime() is implemented in C using an iterative algorithm so I really can't see what would be left to gain here. From that perspective I decided to just remove _systime().
So far time_t values were interpreted as local time values. However, usually time_t values are to be interpreted as "seconds since 1 Jan 1970 in UTC". Therefore all logic handling time_t values has to be changed.
- So far gmtime() called localtime() with an adjusted time_t, now localtime() calls gmtime() with an adjusted time_t.
- mktime() has to do "the opposite" of localtime(), to keep it that way mktime() does now the inverse adjustment made by localtime().
- All currently present time() implementations internally call mktime() so they don't require individual adjustments.
The test program works as-is only if the timezone isn't set (to something different than UTC). However, using localtime() instead of gmtime() makes it at least consistent in that the original time (given to mktime()) is identical to the time retrieved.
