Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 44362
Confusing time specifications
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:33:40 EDT
When giving some details (e.g. an attachment) immediately after entering a bug, the times shown in both bugs are differing in 12 hours. E.g. look bug #44360: bug was reported at 001-06-12 08:45:04, the attachment I have made some seconds later is labeled with 2001-06-12 20:45:46. This is very confusing... I suggest to show all times in GMT -- most people know the difference of their timezone to GMT, but only a few to Red Hat's localtime (EDT??)... The timezone should be shown explicitly also. And btw: please adjust the time of gribble.redhat.com (an NTP client would be perhaps a good idea) -- it seems to differ around 5 minutes from the official time. ;)
Viewing bug 44360, the date shows up next to the attachments as 2001-06-12 08:45:46 for me.
Will attach an image showing how my browser is displaying it (tried it both with `de_DE' and `en' as used language). Perhaps this strange AM/PM presentation of time in a few locales is responsible?
Created attachment 21250 [details] screenshot
I have to confirm this -- I never ever knew what time "EDT" is or how it relates to my time zone, but what I *do* know is the difference of my time zone to UTC. I suggest bugzilla uses UTC times throughout and also labels time stamps with "UTC".
http://bugzilla.redhat.com/rh-bugzilla-beta3/show_bug.cgi?id=44362 Please see if this is acceptable concerning the date presentation
What it the meaning of the trailing '-04'? And are you sure that the time is calculated correctly? E.g. http://bugzilla.redhat.com/rh-bugzilla-beta3/show_bug.cgi?id=76578 says that the bug was entered at '2002-10-25 13:22:57.553146-04 GMT' but it was entered this afternoon (+0200 localtime). Showing the microseconds seems to be a little bit too much information and confuses at this place IMO.
"2001-06-18 12:42:06-04 GMT" Showing seconds seem to much information, I think. But perhaps there are situations where it is needed, but I don't think that's true for most cases. Second, I still strongly propose that you should use times in the UTC time zone. That way no time zone differences have to be specified, and different daylight savings times etc. won't cause trouble. This is after all what UTC should be used for. So instead of the above time stamp, it should read "2001-06-18 08:42:06 UTC" instead. No fuzz, no mess. Third, please refrain from using the acronym "GMT". It was not only obsoleted already in 1972, it is also ambigious as it can be different from UTC. See the links http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html and http://www.apparent-wind.com/gmt-explained.html for more information about that.
Th new Bugzilla seems to be using a different time format. Is still confuses the time zones though - see bug 79568 *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 79568 ***
Changed to 'CLOSED' state since 'RESOLVED' has been deprecated.