Re: timezones & date() breakage

DR>>There is but I was not allowed to enable those functions in PHP 5.1. If DR>>you compile with -DEXPERIMENTAL_DATE_SUPPORT, you have a function DR>>timezone_identifiers_list() which returns a list with all the support DR>>settings. The function timezone_abbreviations_list() returns the known DR>>mappings between obsolete, broken, and non-unique timezone abbreviations DR>>and their real Identifier. This still won't help me, for example, if current TZ rules change and PHP is not updated. For some countries, it does change. And it still means the app won't work with 5.1 release. And I stil don't see why one of the TZ settings couldn't be just "use my system settings"? OK, I will lose all advanced stuff - in this particular case I am ready for that. Why not allow this option? DR>>But it's not an application's problem - it's a server configuration DR>>issue. You can't tell "Not My Problem" to the user - he couldn't care less if he sees wrong dates because php.ini is wrong or datetime.c is wrong or getmydate.php is wrong - for him the whole system is broken. And the bigger problem is that you don't give the PHP app author means to fix it - not at least in PHP 5.1. That's not just server configuration issue - that's server configuration issue that application author couldn't ever fix or route around. And which we could easily fix if we allowed to use system settings. Without that, the only advice app author could give the user as for now is Jani's "don't upgrade". Then the question is - why to write the code that you suggest not to upgrade to? DR>>"without any problem" - are you kidding me? Have a look at a DR>>presentation I gave about it: DR>>http://derickrethans.nl/files/time-ac2005.pdf I didn't mean "there were no problems in data functions at all in older PHP" - I'm sure there was if it required rewrite. I did mean "default configuration gave expected results without any additional hoops to jump through". Meaning, I could just take any PHP and run date() and get my systems date - now I can't. I'm sure there were a lot of things I couldn't do before and now I can - but that doesn't help me with the problem. I can't say to the user "you don't see correct time in the app, but that's because if you ever needed to know what time is it now on Madagaskar I could tell you". -- Stanislav Malyshev, Zend Products Engineer stas@zend.com http://www.zend.com/ +972-3-6139665 ext.115