[geeks] DST hell

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: Joshua Boyd <jdboyd at jdboyd.net>
>Date: 2007/03/10 Sat AM 11:52:50 CST
>To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: Re: [geeks] DST hell

>On Sat, Mar 10, 2007 at 10:00:39AM -0600, Mike Hebel wrote:
>
>> If we're dealing with Win-blows boxes you would:
>> 
>> 1) Patch the PDC for DST.
>> 2) Use ntp to set it's local clock.
>> 3) Turn off DST on the desktops.
>> 4) Use "net time" in the login scripts to set the local time to the 
>> PDC.  (0)
>> 
>> Mike Hebel
>> (0) You _are_ making sure your users logout every night right?  Unless 
>> of course you've got third-shift people that is.
>
>Seems poor form to require that your users always logout at night.

If your server stores *everything* in UTC, then your client applications will need to be able to properly "decode" it based on daylight savings time, right? All you've done is avoided the OS fix.

As a "for instance" - say I've got a database that is storing date/time stamps in UTC, but my users want to see DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM, after the code retrieves the timestamp, the application will need to convert it (or your DB will have to convert it, same diff really)...

Right? (Not really a programmer (any more), but I did stay at a Holiday Inn last night... ;^)

Lionel