Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:67503
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: error (pb1.pair.com: domain ralphschindler.com from 209.85.214.169 cause and error)
Message-ID: <519FB6DB.2080702@ralphschindler.com>
Date: Fri, 24 May 2013 13:52:11 -0500
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.8; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130509 Thunderbird/17.0.6
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: Stas Malyshev <smalyshev@sugarcrm.com>
CC: Daniel Lowrey <rdlowrey@gmail.com>, 
 "internals@lists.php.net" <internals@lists.php.net>
References: <CAH8Mpnmin=caSgrOQYZD23q80eZEVO4jyRUAYKNc2URU-2RVnQ@mail.gmail.com> <519E77B4.2050503@sugarcrm.com>
In-Reply-To: <519E77B4.2050503@sugarcrm.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] date.timezone E_WARNING -- Really necessary? What's
 the rationale?
From: ralph@ralphschindler.com (Ralph Schindler)

While UTC is not *ideal*, I am failing to see why its not a reasonable 
default.  After all, according to

http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.date-default-timezone-get.php

"If none of the above succeed, date_default_timezone_get() will return a 
default timezone of UTC."

If people care about dealing with time's in a non-UTC way, it seems to 
me they they would either A) ensure their server is set to an 
appropriate timezone (by setting it or bugging their system 
administrator) or B) ensuring their app calls 
date_default_timezone_set() in a bootstrap/initialization script 
(globally) or C) set the timezone in an application context specific way 
through DateTime::setTimezone().

As far as I can tell, with all standard distribution extensions, there 
is no other extension that will toss a warning with the default 
configuration... thus making this the outlier.

-ralph

On 5/23/13 3:10 PM, Stas Malyshev wrote:
> Hi!
>
>> 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
>
> I'm not sure how this follows - CLI is capable of using ini file just
> like the rest of SAPIs. Why not create it?
>
>> The "U" in UTC *does* stand for "Universal," after all. It's a
>> sensible default and as such shouldn't
>
> I don't think it's a sensible default - people don't actually use UTC
> when considering dates. A minority of people can use timezone that
> coincides with UTC, but not very many use actual UTC.
>