Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:67458
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: pass (pb1.pair.com: domain gmail.com designates 209.85.223.174 as permitted sender)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Date: Thu, 23 May 2013 14:40:02 -0400
Message-ID: <CAH8Mpnmin=caSgrOQYZD23q80eZEVO4jyRUAYKNc2URU-2RVnQ@mail.gmail.com>
To: internals@lists.php.net
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Subject: date.timezone E_WARNING -- Really necessary? What's the rationale?
From: rdlowrey@gmail.com (Daniel Lowrey)

I'm probably not the typical PHP user; I spend 99% of my PHP time
using the CLI (and not web SAPIs).
This means that I frequently run PHP without an .ini file. As a
result, when I use any of the date/time
functionality I invariably end up with this awesomeness:

> Warning: date(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings blah blah blah.

Could I run `$ php -d date.timezone=UTC myfile.php`? Of course, but
should that really be necessary?
It seems to me this warning caters to the very lowest common
denominator among PHP devs who can't
be bothered to understand how PHP handles timezones. The warning also
seems to assume that people only
use PHP as a web framework and not as an actual programming language
(otherwise I wouldn't have to
explain to the CLI which timezone I want to use). I don't need php.ini
... I want to use PHP to *program*.

If it's going to default to UTC anyway should there really be an
E_WARNING? Can't PHP just quietly use UTC?
The "U" in UTC *does* stand for "Universal," after all. It's a
sensible default and as such shouldn't
merit a warning. Besides, if someone doesn't understand what's
happening and gets unexpected date/time
results the first thing they're going to do (I hope) is hit their
favorite search engine for "set PHP timezone."

Perhaps I'm the only person to experience ongoing annoyance at the
hands of this protective
"feature?" Is there a substantive reason why this warning exists other
than the error message's
suggestion that "you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier?"
I understand that one of PHP's
most attractive features is ease-of-use for programming novices but
you can only go so far in
preventing people who don't know what they're doing from shooting
themselves in the foot.

I'm not sure if it's possible but perhaps a compromise might be to
disable this warning in the CLI, at least?