use Perl

• Other Way Round? (Score:1)

  by Smylers (2592)

  Suppose that DateTime were the other way round, and defaulted to the local timezone. Then somebody could've made an equivalent blog post to yours but comparing DateTime->now with gmtime and complaining that they are different!

  There are 2 different possible behaviours. Obviously the module can only do 1 of them by default.

  I've been inconvenienced the other way round, when I discovered that our MySQL database was storing timestamps in local time rather than UTC and not storing the timezone.
  • Re:Other Way Round? (Score:2)

    by samtregar (2699)

    You're striking at the heart of the matter by bringing up MySQL. That's our DB and it's probably the first place I ever saw a "NOW()" function. As you mention NOW() in MySQL is just like "now" in real life - it's local time. So when I see DateTime->now(), well, I expect the same. And if I called you up right now and said "hey, what time is it now?" you'd probably meet my expectations too!

    Sure, that doesn't mean that everyone should expect that or that the developers of DateTime are morons. They ju
    • Re:Other Way Round? (Score:1)

      by pijll (5242) on 2006.04.05 3:55 (#46970) Journal

      Information on the local time may be easy to find everywhere, but the info on the timezone may be much harder. You can get the time difference between localtime and UTC, but that does not uniquely define a timezone.

      E.g., in your example, the only thing we know about your timezone is that it is '+0400' now, but we don't know what DST rules you have. So instead of guessing the correct timezone, DateTime chooses to let the user decide.

      Reply to This

      Parent