Comments on: PHP5 vs. daylight saving in Ubuntu 8.04.1 LTS

By: Malcolm Caldwell

Malcolm Caldwell — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 01:04:15 +0000

What about the NT? Are we not a part of Australia anymore? Or do you think we have been annexed by Queensland.

By: Jeff Waugh

Jeff Waugh — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 03:42:02 +0000

@Raphael Geissert: Righteous!

By: Raphael Geissert

Raphael Geissert — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 00:34:57 +0000

@Derick Rethans:

What kind of extra information will PHP 5.3 provide that can’t be read from the system’s tzdb?

Also, you said:

(in the thread)
> Why do you need this? There is the PECL timezonedb extension which is
> updated just as frequently.

(here)

> I am often also quicker releasing a new timezonedb package than debian is with their > tzdata stuff.

Right, but only when you *do* update it (though IIRC you once took almost a month to update the extension wrt the Oslon database). In 2007 you missed a, d, f, and g.

I do understand that it is more convenient to ship an embedded database because of compatibility with windows, and such; but it doesn’t apply to every situation.

Oh, and as Sean Finney stated in the thread, we – actually *I* – packaged the PECL extension but we soon dropped it in favour of the patch; which translated into one less thing to spend/waste time on.

By: Pierre Phaneuf

Pierre Phaneuf — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 04:43:07 +0000

Yeah, that too. Reminds me of a classic exchange from two former co-workers of mine:

– Ack! I just spent 30 minutes tracking down…
– … a 1-character problem?
– Yeah, it seems that (in PHP) a null string evaluates to 1… There should be some kind of warning about that…
– Such as: Warning: why aren’t you using Perl?

The irony of Perl being saner than PHP (or, well, pretty much anything) is not lost on me.

By: James

James — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 04:38:35 +0000

Another good reason not to use PHP

By: Jeremy Visser

Jeremy Visser — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 23:25:09 +0000

I once heard that all the ISP shaping and quota scripts were written in PHP. I normally schedule big downloads to start at 12:05am, which is when our offpeak quota starts.

Interestingly, I noticed that when daylight saving started, for the first hour of my scheduled downloads, they were counted as peak downloads. I now start my downloads at 1:05am.

I wonder if this was caused by that PHP bug.

By: Pierre Phaneuf

Pierre Phaneuf — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 15:33:59 +0000

Death to daylight savings!

By: Derick Rethans

Derick Rethans — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 13:22:32 +0000

Read my comments in the thread: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.php.devel/47609

Also note, that debian has a tzdata-java package… so there’s no reason why they can’t add a tzdata-php package. I am often also quicker releasing a new timezonedb package than debian is with their tzdata stuff.

By: Jeff Waugh

Jeff Waugh — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 13:15:13 +0000

@Derick Rethans: Aside from the 5.3 issue, why is it a “really bad idea”? I can’t think of a case in which it would be more sensible to use a separate datasource that may get out of sync (and thus require more oversight and maintenance on behalf of the distributor — upstream or otherwise).

In terms of 5.3, perhaps the patch can be reworked to “fall up” to provide the additional information as sugar on top of the system time zone database.

By: Derick Rethans

Derick Rethans — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 13:06:37 +0000

No, using the system timezone database is a really bad idea. I’ve tried talking sense into the original developer of that patch (it first made it into RedHat) but he wouldn’t listen. This patch to use the system tzdata won’t work from PHP 5.3 and up anymore anyway – as PHP adds extra information to it that the system tzdata does not provide.