Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!ucsd!rutgers!cmcl2!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.sources.bugs
Subject: Re: Flame: Problem with zoo: restoring times
Message-ID: <9695@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 23 Feb 89 12:49:16 GMT
References: <2884@mhres.mh.nl> <5930001@eecs.nwu.edu> <3453@sugar.uu.net> <1989Feb19.134220.29438@gpu.utcs.toronto.edu> <3465@sugar.uu.net> <1989Feb20.183931.13918@gpu.utcs.toronto.edu> <5798@bsu-cs.UUCP> <7803@chinet.chi.il.us>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 24

In article <7803@chinet.chi.il.us> les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) writes:
>How about a command line option to adjust the file times by a specified
>amount?  Then you could use local time on machines that don't know GMT
>and still be able to fix things if you want to install on a machine in
>another time zone or one that does know GMT.  After all, if you don't
>know how much the time is off, then it probably doesn't really matter.

Finally, a sensible comment about this.

Folks, for interchange between sites if you desire to accurately
convey the time information in the archive then you MUST establish
some sort of standard.  "Everybody use local time" will not do,
unless some such command line option (or environment variable, etc.)
is available and the user sets it up correctly.  Even knowing what
local time is recorded in the archive will not do, unless the
receiving site knows the relevant time-zone rules for BOTH sites.
An archive with UTC0 embedded in it has a universal (or at least
planetary) meaning for its time stamps, which enables each site to
deal only with its own time-zone problems independently of the other.

As the man says, if you don't care if the time is off half a day
or so, then you needn't convert between local time and UTC0 anyway.
Archives maintained for use at a single site will be self-consistent
in either case.