[account42]

> Many POSIX systems rely on `/etc/localtime` to define the system-wide time zone, and every `localtime` call has to check if the file has been changed or not because there is no way to subscribe to the system-wide time zone change event.

But you can subscribe to file change events so why not do that?

[lifthrasiir]

I did seriously consider inotify back in time, but in order to take advantage of inotify I had to parse all binary TZif files (because otherwise I still had to call `localtime` that would `stat` every time anyway). It was so cumbersome, that was only halfway finished when I stepped down as a maintainer. Hence my surprise when I learned that someone actually did implement all of them.