[Koha-devel] Invalid local time for date in time zone: America/Santiago

[Barton Chittenden]

On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 8:23 PM, David Cook <dcook at prosentient.com.au> wrote:

> Hey Barton,
>
>
> ...

>
>
> Also, I’d never heard of date_t before your email, and the only references
> I can see to it are for specific projects which have implemented it as a
> new data structure themselves. I think time_t is the standard and that
> depends on your system architecture, although as you can see in those above
> links – it’s more complicated than that in MySQL.
>

First, let me say that I was in a slap-dash mood this morning -- technical
accuracy was playing second fiddle to whatever stands in for a sense of
humor in my head. In that context:

... Yeah. I meant time_t. The point being that time_t should, by default,
compile to a 64 bit int on a 64 bit machine, and therefore not cause 2038
bugs.

Given that MySQL *does* have a 2038 bug in its implementation of timestamp,
I guess that using datetime with the timezone set to UCT makes sense ...
or, if we *really* want to make a dramatic move, we could move away from
MySQL

--
>
> I’m not sure I understand your reaction :p. I also field support tickets
> for a living, and I think it would be a lot easier to field tickets for a
> re-architected system that is created off years of experience rather than
> years of technical debt. Of course, I know re-architecting a system is also
> a lot easier said than done. But I think that’s why you see folks like
> EBSCO thinking about creating a microservice based system which can
> integrate with Koha. Incremental change.
>

Once again, I wasn't being entirely serious. I'm very much in favor of
working to make Koha internally consistent, removing un-intentional
limitations such as global time zone settings, and generally removing
technical debt, but having said that, I'm a bit ambivalent about it, simply
because moving too aggressively in that direction does create a lot of
change in a short period of time, and that's rough on the support folks.
You mentioned creating a version of Koha that would break the current
schema, requiring something more akin to a data migration than an
upgrade... that suggests a large change and a lot of additional work...
channeling Darth Vader's "Noooooooooooo!" was just my over-dramatic way of
saying that. ... there was a ';-)' missing at the end of that statement.

I've got other thoughts, but I think they're better suited to Mark
Tompsett's "1 timezone system?" thread.

To be taken with a large grain of salt,

--Barton
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