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Date: Sat, 25 May 2013 11:03:11 -0400
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To: "internals@lists.php.net" <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] date.timezone E_WARNING -- Really necessary? What's the rationale?
From: preinheimer@gmail.com (Paul Reinheimer)

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Hi List,


> Wouldn't it be possible to have it default to the system's timezone if
> available? Most software seems to be able to use the correct timezone.
> From a user's pov it is strange that PHP is pretty much the only service
> which has to have it's own timezone configuration.
>
>
I appreciate the current state of things.

There's only one thing worse than having an operation return the wrong
answer, and that's having it return the wrong answer silently. The latter
can happen with the wrong TZ setting. I've got a myriad of different
systems to deal with, some distro-based installs of PHP separating out
php.ini for the CLI, and for Apache. Other installs using the same file
like I expect. I make mistakes.

I'm currently maintaining ~100 servers from a slew of different providers
around the world. The clock is hard enough to trust, let alone what the
system's TZ setting is. The #1 answer from providers when we complain that
the clock is 2 hours off is to just change the timezone.


When I get the blast of warnings, I'm shaken from complacency to invest one
minute to find the right file, add the setting, and forget about it once
more.



paul

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