On Mon, Nov 01, 2021 at 11:18:02AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote: > I have to wonder why gm_time_t() needs to use two separate codepaths > for positive and negative tz_offset, while the new code here can get > away without. Does it have something to do with the direction of > truncation during division and modulo operation? Hmm. Unless I am missing something, this part of gm_time_t() is simply over-complicating things: minutes = tz < 0 ? -tz : tz; minutes = (minutes / 100)*60 + (minutes % 100); minutes = tz < 0 ? -minutes : minutes; We switch to doing the computation in absolute-value units, but then restore the sign. But just: minutes = (tz / 100) * 60 + (tz % 100); is equivalent and shorter. If tz is negative, then both terms will be negative, which is what you want (they sum to a larger absolute-value negative number). This comes from f80cd783c6 (date.c: add "show_date()" function., 2005-05-06), so I don't see any sign that there was specific thought given to some obscure handling. And indeed later fixes like fbab835c03 ([PATCH] fix show_date() for positive timezones, 2005-05-18) imply to me that the original was just confused. Later we do: if (minutes > 0) { if (unsigned_add_overflows(time, minutes * 60)) die("Timestamp+tz too large: %"PRItime" +%04d", time, tz); } else if (time < -minutes * 60) die("Timestamp before Unix epoch: %"PRItime" %04d", time, tz); And that does need separate paths for the overflow check, since we're checking different boundaries. I suspect for the strftime() code that we wouldn't need similar checks, because the earlier ones would have caught any problems (i.e., we would not get as far as having a "struct tm" that represented something outside the range of our time_t). -Peff