Allthough most dive computers always use local time and don't support
timezones at all, there are a few exceptions. There are two different
sources of timezone information:
- Some of the newer Uwatec/Scubapro devices use UTC internally and also
support a timezone setting. This UTC offset is currently taken into
account to obtain the dive date/time, but the UTC offset itself is
lost.
- Uwatec/Scubapro and Reefnet devices rely on the clock of the host
system to synchronize the internal device clock and calculate the
dive date/time. The consequence is that the resulting date/time is
always in the timezone of the host system.
In order to preserve this timezone information, the dc_datetime_t
structure is extended with a new "timezone" field, containing the UTC
offset in seconds. Devices without timezone support will set the field
to the special value DC_TIMEZONE_NONE.
The dc_datetime_localtime() and dc_datetime_gmtime() functions will
automatically populate the new field with respectively the local
timezone offset and zero. The dc_datetime_mktime() function will take
into account the new timezone field for the conversion to UTC. The
special value DC_TIMEZONE_NONE is interpreted as zero.