Re: Why does PHP consider the system's timezone unreliable, and is date_default_timezone_set() required?

On 17 Feb 2014 at 16:46, Stuart Dallas <stuart@3ft9.com> wrote: > On 17 Feb 2014, at 13:14, Martin Tournoij <martin@arp242.net> wrote: > >> Is this somehow unreliable? This is all POSIX stuff, so I would expect it to >> work well on at least all POSIX sysyems, or am I missing something? > > It doesn’t mean unreliable in the technical sense, just that it’s very > common for the timezone of a server to be different from the timezone you > want, so it forces you to make a choice. This issue extends beyond shared > hosting to dedicated servers where the person who set it up hasn’t changed > the timezone from the default. PHP is simply reminding you to check that the > timezone is what you want it to be rather than being surprised when it appears > that the time is wrong. That may be a reasonable thing to do if your PHP is executing on a server. In my case it's on a user's machine and obtaining what the system thinks is the timezone value, just so I can tell PHP, has proved to be a pain in the bum. At least under unix (and so OS X) it seems I can look at what: /etc/localtime (which is a link) equates to. I couldn't find any reliable way at all to do it under Windows. People shouldn't assume that all execution of PHP takes place on a server, because it doesn't. -- Cheers -- Tim