The time stamps on comments in Bugzilla (including the initial report) say "UTC" in them, but in reality they appear to be Eastern time.
*** Bug 44362 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
It would be nice if Bugzilla really used UTC. This would help all international contributors. There are several benefits: * All timezones around the world are relative to the UTC and defined to be a difference with regards to UTC. A user living in a particular timezone is more likely to easily know about his time zone's difference to UTC than the difference to any other random time zone around the world, such as the one the bugzilla should happen to be in. Also, using the difference to UTC is a much easier mental computation than having to use both the user's own difference to UTC and the bugzilla's and having to use both to compute the actual local time. * UTC is not affected by daylight savings time. This means that timestamps are valid all year. Thus, with bugzilla using UTC, all the user needs to know is his own time zone's use of daylight savings time, and not also the one of the time zone the bugzilla happens to be in, when it occurs etc.
The time stamps say 'EST' now, but I've no idea what 'EST' means. Doesn't seem to be Eastern Australia. The three-letter names are almost all ambiguous -- you really need to give timezones numerically ('+1000' instead of EST, for example). UTC would definitely be better than this, although even better might be to display the time in the user's _own_ time zone, according to stored preference. That shouldn't be hard.
There needs to be a timezone preference in bugzilla, with a default to the international time standard. Using EST makes it _more_ difficult to work out what time an entry was really modified.
Red Hat's current Bugzilla version is 2.18. I am moving all older open bugs to this version. Any bugs against the older versions will need to be verified that they are still bugs. This will help me also to sort them better.
Time stamps correctly say "EST" now. While I argee that a preference for this would be a really good idea, this probably needs to be filed as a separate bug report. (And if you do, please mention the bug number here. Thanks!)
"EST" cannot possibly be called 'correct'. It's ambiguous. Timezones must always be given numerically, if you must use anything other than UTC.