[Freeipa-devel] timestamps

[John Dennis]

On 07/15/2009 03:05 PM, Dmitri Pal wrote:
> 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.

Absolutely, I was trying to say this before, but I guess I wasn't clear.

>
> 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.

This is one of the primary reasons why ISO 8601 was invented and why 
what is cited above is deprecated and discouraged.

If someone wants to view a timestamp in their locale because they prefer 
the locale's formatting over the 8601 formatting then the proper 
procedure is to take the 8601 timestamp and format it according to the 
preferred locale during *presentation*. This is a rendering issue, *not* 
a data issue. Never under any circumstances should timestamps be stored 
in locale specific formats.

> 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.
>


-- 
John Dennis <jdennis at redhat.com>

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