<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><br></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sat, Mar 6, 2021 at 7:48 PM Ben Scott <<a href="mailto:dragonhawk@gmail.com">dragonhawk@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">On Thu, Mar 4, 2021 at 9:57 PM Joshua Judson Rosen<br>
<<a href="mailto:rozzin@hackerposse.com" target="_blank">rozzin@hackerposse.com</a>> wrote:<br>
> And as a general word of advice from someone whose been burnt way too many times:<br>
> if you're going to put timestamps in your filenames, either just use UTC<br>
> or explicitly indicate which timezone the timestamps are assuming.<br>
<br>
Even that's not enough, because the stupid humans keep changing what<br>
the time zones mean. Say you find a file that has a stored time of<br>
2007 MAR 31 17:00 UTC. If that file was written before 2005, then the<br>
offset to US Eastern is 5 hours. If that file was written after 2005,<br>
the offset is 4 hours. Which did the human mean when they instructed<br>
the computer to write the file? No way of knowing, in the general<br>
case.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I'd argue that this case does not matter, because the human is making a reference to an event in the future, and it is impossible in principle to anticipate unexpected future changes in such definitions. <br></div><div><br></div><div>You could plan a vacation in Switzerland in 2030, but if an asteroid obliterates Switzerland in 2028, your vacation plans become null and void. It's not a contingency you need to plan for when making your vacation plans. <br></div><div> <br></div></div><div class="gmail_quote"><br></div>-- <br><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr">John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix<br>Email <a href="mailto:jabr@blu.org" target="_blank">jabr@blu.org</a> / WWW <a href="http://www.abreau.net" target="_blank">http://www.abreau.net</a> / PGP-Key-ID 0x920063C6<br>PGP-Key-Fingerprint A5AD 6BE1 FEFE 8E4F 5C23 C2D0 E885 E17C 9200 63C6<br><br></div></div></div>