Re: Local time zone

On Sun, 11 Dec 2011, Oleg Oshmyan wrote: > * The tzname C variable can be used to get two abbreviations for the > current zone (typically the standard one and the DST one for zones > where DST is used), which allows to improve the guess compared to using > just one abbreviation; for example, the time zone in London in winter > will be guessed as Europe/London rather than UTC. It's a guess, and that's the problem. Guessing makes up for odd and strange bugs if it's not 100% accurate (which it isn't). > * /etc/localtime is often a symbolic link to or a copy of > /usr/share/zoneinfo/<time zone identifier>. In this case this time zone > identifier can be considered another candidate just like the values > of date.timezone and TZ. This might work on some distrbutions, but not nearly on all. And definitely not on Windows. On Debian it's not a symlink for example. > * This requires more effort, but ideally PHP should just have a special > time zone named something like 'System' that would use /etc/localtime > instead of any built-in time zone data, just like the localtime > C function does when the TZ environment variable is empty. That's a really bad idea, as we've discussed before on this list. cheers, Derick