Re: [Exim] TZ logging buglet

Philip Hazel writes:

> This is certainly some people's view. As always, I'm prepared to
> listen to what other people think, especially people who live in
> timezones other than GMT. It would make virtually zero difference to
> me to change Exim to work in GMT, but if I were living in Australia,
> say, I would be unhappy if all times in email were GMT/UTC/TIA
> rather than local time.
>
> What do other people think?

I have recently changed the logging code I use at work (which is
nothing to do with Exim but is relevant to this issue) to stamp all
messages using the results of gmtime() instead of localtime().

The reason I did it was that these log messages get fed into various
other programs, which need to interpret the times, and I didn't want
to have to worry about timezones and DST at that level. (In my
application it's just conceivable that the log generator and the log
analyser could be in different timezones, though they currently
aren't.)

At the same time the idea of reading the log files themselves in UTC
wasn't attractive (at least in the summer); however it's relatively
easy to convert these to local time prior to display, so I have a
program to do that and will be telling my users to use that.

> There was a discussion about this on some newsgroup or mailing list
> some time ago. There is clearly a set of people who want a standard
> time, and an equally committed group who want local time. I find it
> useful in mail I receive to have an indication of the timezone of
> the sender. ("Oh, it's gone midnight over there - I needn't rush to
> reply, even though it's fairly urgent." Or if somebody says
> "tomorrow" or "yesterday" you have a vague idea of when they mean.)
> For those reasons, I prefer the times in messages and Received:
> lines to be local time followed by a numerical offset. I also
> believe this is helpful to non-expert users.

I agree with this.

> Logs, I suppose, could be arguably different, though I'd hate to have
> logs that were rotated daily at midnight in fact containing times on
> different days, but as I say, it wouldn't affect me much.

I think the answer for logs tends to depend on what you are going to
do with them: if you're ujst going to eyeball them (which I would
guess, without any evidence, is the requirement of the majority) you
want local time, if you're going to process them with some program you
might plausibly want UTC.

I think that argues for the behaviour of Exim in this area being
configurable, probably defaulting to local time.

ttfn/rjk