🚀 go-pugleaf

From: plus5!hokey@sally.UTEXAS.EDU (Hokey)
Date: Sat, 4 Jan 86 12:21:58 CST

>Date: Fri, 3 Jan 86 09:52:13 est
>From: harvard!encore!babel!ptw@sally.UTEXAS.EDU (P. Tucker Withington)
>
>Regarding the daylight savings bugaboo:  I feel this is a red herring.
>You probably care when the present time is DST, but being off by +/-
>1 hour on ancient file dates is not going to really bother anyone.  Thus
>it is probably sufficient to have a shell script in your profile to set
>any "exceptional" DST times.

This situation is precisely why all timestamps should be kept in GMT.

At the systems level there can be problems with make, backups, and cron,
and at the applications level there can be problems tracking events (this
becomes critical in, for example, health care.  Looks kinda strange when
critical tests are performed, say, a half hour after a patient dies (or
when there is an hour gap between patient admission and performance of the
tests).

[ Make uses the internal system format; I don't believe anyone has argued
that that should be anything but GMT.  It is not clear (at least to me)
that keeping the human-readable presentation formats used by things like
cron in GMT instead of local time will decrease human errors:  people do
mostly think in local time.  -mod ]

-- 
Hokey           ..ihnp4!plus5!hokey
		  314-725-9492

Volume-Number: Volume 5, Number 6