Quoth Philip Hazel on Mon, Feb 21, 2000: > 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.
There are also people who run on UTC (where "run" is defined as
"set their watches to"). I can understand them. These are
people who travel a lot between time zones. These are
postmasters who mail their overseas collegues several times a
day. These are people who have no real reason to be localized.
> I find it useful in mail
> I receive to have an indication of the timezone of the sender.
When I mail someone who is in a different timezone ATM, I either
tell time in UTC, or in his timezone, always indicating what
timezone I'm talking in. And when I order plane tickets, I
always ask what timezone they are talking about, as they usually
give departure and arrival times in different timezones (local to
the place where the event happens).
> 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 don't know how helpful it is to newbies, but it's not trivial to
live in the world when you talk to people from around the globe ;)
> 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.
BTW, a hint for admins: don't run cron jobs at times of night
when timezones change (such as, between 00:00 and 01:00 in most
places, between 02:00 and 03:00 in Israel, etc.).