The timezone problem

Bradley Baetz bbaetz at gmail.com
Thu Nov 12 12:42:13 UTC 2009


On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 5:48 PM, Max Kanat-Alexander
<mkanat at bugzilla.org> wrote:

>
>        I think that would work. You could even use DateTime like we do, so
> you'd be using the same code to get convert it backward that we're using
> to spit out the timezone info in the first place. The only problem is
> that we're not *storing* times in UTC, so DST times will actually be
> wrong when converted, I think (not sure).

Yeah, the DST thing is a common issue. I'd like for us to say that all
times are UTC, always, and the front ends do the conversion, but I'm
not 100% sure that stuff won't break. I'm pretty sure that we require
the DB server and the web server to be in the same timezone because of
these issues (do we still?), so if you're doing any client-side
conversion there may be issues.

Long term it'd be best to do UTC and fix what breaks, rather than
encode a local timestamp into a brand new interface, though.

Bradley



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