[Freeipa-devel] timestamps

[Dmitri Pal]

Hi

We had a phone conversation with Simo and came to agreement.
He is looking at the problem from the "computer" point of view, I am
trying to look from the perspective of the user (admin) who looks at the
result of the search against the log data.

>From computer point of view UTC + offset is needed for the use case I
was not thinking about:
Give me all the login attempts after 6PM local time for last month for
servers all over the world.

Since such query would require comparison done in local time the offset
is crucial for such use case.

But Simo agrees that for the user looking at the log results it might be
important to see the full local time stamp in the format "Wed Jul 15
13:51:51 EDT 2009" or similar.
The  timezone in this case  may be a valuable hint to the administrator.
Such time stamp can't be generated from UTC + offset on the central server.
The problem with such time stamp is the locale. If the time stamp is
logged in the locale of the machine it might not be readable to the
administrator and thus be useless.
I suggested that we might be able to configure an overriding locale
without changing the process' locale.
I think it is possible but I might be wrong. I will investigate and come
back with more details.   

-- 
Thank you,
Dmitri Pal

Engineering Manager IPA project,
Red Hat Inc.


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