On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 8:23 PM, David Cook <dcook@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