On Mon, Aug 12, 2019 at 9:45 AM Lassi Kortela <xxxxxx@lassi.io> wrote:

     (user-info:full-name user-info) => first subfield of GECOS
     (user-info:personal-info user-info) => list of remaining subfields

Works for me, except that I really, really want to keep the name "gecos" out of the spec, except as an explanatory comment.
 
On some OS with a better thought out user database, the personal-info
list could perhaps be an association list. Windows networks use Active
Directory for user information. It's based on LDAP. Is anyone here
familiar with what kinds of user info are stored in LDAP?

Almost anything.  The X.500 people standardized favouriteDrink to make the point that user directories aren't confined to information needed by computers.  (X.500 is the standard, LDAP is the wire protocol.)
 
We are slowly winning you over to the
Posix-is-only-one-of-several-guidelines camp :)

Actually, no.  I'm just saying that whatever was already true back in Research Unix 7th Edition, like the values of the permission bits, can be assumed true in all Posix systems as well.

On Mon, Aug 12, 2019 at 10:08 AM <xxxxxx@ancell-ent.com> wrote:

 Echoing Lassi above, I'm going to strongly argue this is
*fantastically* beyond the remit of a SRFI-170 implementor.

Actually, what's really needed is the timezone *root*, since the date-time SRFI needs to be able to find the timezone files themselves.  They could be almost anywhere on Windows, which does not provide them standard (but they are available with a Java or Python installation and can be installed stand-alone if need be).  So flush current-timezone.

Unfortunately, none of the <time.h> variables are useful to us:

> extern int    daylight;

This is a weird flag where 0 means 'never does daylight time' and 1 means 'sometimes does daylight time'. 
 
> extern long   timezone;

This is the current offset from local *standard* time to UTC.  
 
> extern char  *tzname[];

This is the name of the current offset, not timezone, like EST for the U.S. or Australian east coast.  It's only useful for date formatting.