[Zope3-dev] mini-RFC: times and timezones
Martijn Faassen
faassen at infrae.com
Fri Feb 25 17:57:22 EST 2005
Gary Poster wrote:
[snip]
> Other observations:
> - Working internally with utc datetimes is considered best practice[4].
> The Zope 3 code base does store UTC dates, just without a timezone.
My gut feeling is that it would make sense to store UTC only and convert
on intput and output.
My gut feeling is based on similar pattern as the one used with unicode
strings. Mixing unicode and non-unicode strings can lead to bugs at
random places in the codebase and to ugly hackery to suppress such bugs.
It can be seen with Zope 2 unicode aware code.
There are some use cases for timezone independent datetime, such as
having an appointment across the atlantic and not wanting to see it's at
3 am while it's really at 9 am. This can be fixed by judicious use of
display hints too; you could have a datetime display in the timezone it
is saved in. This requires an explicit storing of timezone information
in this particular case, but that may be worthwhile.
Regards,
Martijn
More information about the Zope3-dev
mailing list