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Date: Sat, 25 May 2013 12:04:17 -0400
Message-ID: <CAH8MpnmRP3mFU9wndB3_QmFP6oWV73Tdn7AKtDJdsL55z-D-Mw@mail.gmail.com>
To: Nikita Popov <nikita.ppv@gmail.com>
Cc: Derick Rethans <derick@php.net>, Stas Malyshev <smalyshev@sugarcrm.com>, 
	"internals@lists.php.net" <internals@lists.php.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] date.timezone E_WARNING -- Really necessary? What's the rationale?
From: rdlowrey@gmail.com (Daniel Lowrey)

> This issue is less about date.timezone than being able to run without an ini file.

This is my complaint. My point of view is that PHP is a programming
language, not some goofball windows application. Forcing me to use an
.ini file to be able to program is a real annoyance. And in my humble
opinion, triggering a warning "because the worst programmers can't
correctly set a timezone" is a dubious justification. Granted, I don't
have to answer the bug reports, but how difficult is it to say, "No,
this is not a bug. Let me google this for you," and close as "Will not
fix?" People who think a UTC timezone default is a bug are equivalent
to my grandparents who think the television is broken because they
don't know how to press the remote control's power button. Please,
PHP, do we have to accommodate the very lowest common denominator? If
you don't kick the baby birds out of the nest they'll never learn to
fly. I get that everyone doesn't agree, but this seems like a
no-brainer to me.

On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 5:35 PM, Nikita Popov <nikita.ppv@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 2:40 AM, Derick Rethans <derick@php.net> wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, 23 May 2013, Daniel Lowrey wrote:
>>
>> > I guess my point is that I don't believe default settings should
>> > trigger errors. If it's a default setting, it's a default setting.
>>
>> No - you, as an admin, are required to make an informed decision on what
>> you want your timezone to be. There have been way too many bug reports
>> where people had no clue, so now we throw a warning.
>
>
> Sorry, but I fail to see why date.timezone needs special handling. What
> makes the date.timezone setting so important, that it is the only one which
> value you are required to set? There are settings that are arguably a lot
> more important than this, but which do not throw such warnings. E.g., why
> isn't there a warning for cases where error_reporting is not explicitly
> specified? I can't count the number of StackOverflow questions caused by bad
> error_reporting settings and I'm very sure this number surpasses complains
> about timezones by several orders of magnitude.
>
> Yet - of course! - we do no such thing, for it is senseless. After all,
> there *is* a reason why we have defaults for ini settings. People should
> only be required to changed them when necessary. Date.timezone should be no
> exception to this.
>
> Nikita