Re: $DateZone: (ZONE)$ (was RE: $DateLocal$)

[Greg A. Woods]

The problem with using local time in CVS, either in history reports, or
in keywords, is that it's mostly a problem in the mind of the person
reading the time.  Anyone who has experience in any domain with multiple
timezones will be able to appreciate the need for using Universal
Coordinated Time (UTC, aka GMT).  Often training of the users can be
assisted by putting a UTC clock in plain view so that they can quickly
and easily learn to do the conversion to their local time.

Generally speaking I also have to wonder what's so critical about the
time of a commit operation that users have to know it exactly or to
compare it to the current local time.  Usually the only thing that's
important on such a fine-grained scale is the delta between two
timestamps, and most people can do such calculations in their heads
(especially if they ignore the minutes ;-).

So, what problem exactly are you trying to solve by introducing the
fatally flawed concept of local time into CVS keywords?

(Note also that you're going to have to hack a copy of RCS too if you
ever need to use RCS to access repository files.)

-- 
                                                        Greg A. Woods

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