Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 0/1] adding user.hideTimezone for setting UTC timezone

From: "brian m. carlson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 3 Oct 2020 19:53:25 +0000

On 2020-10-01 at 03:43:50, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
> Junio C Hamano wrote:
> > You can let the existing code produce its natural result and then
> > when the "force UTC" flag is set, override the offset part to +0000
> > if and only if the timezone was obtained from the current
> > environment (this if-and-only-if is necessary, because you do not
> > want to rewrite and force UTC when you run "git commit --amend"
> > without the "--reset-author" option to update a commit that was
> > created somewhere else to UTC).  That way, we do not have to futz
> > with TZ environment or tzset.
> 
> Yes, I think this is simpler and nicer than the proposal in my other
> reply.

Yeah, I agree this is more desirable.

> In addition to not having to futz with TZ, I think I like the
> semantics better.  The motivation that started this thread was not so
> much "I want to set a custom timezone to blend in" but rather "why are
> we recording the timezone at all here?"  In that context, it makes
> sense to me to have a setting such as
> 
> 	core.recordTimeZone
> 
> that I can turn *off* to say that I don't think datestamp() callers
> should consider the timezone to be information worth recording (and
> instead they should write +0000).  To me that seems a little simpler
> to understand than user.hideTimezone since this focuses on turning
> some functionality off (recording of the time zone) instead of turning
> on a new stealth mode.

I'd like to make one suggestion here, and that's that instead of writing
"+0000" in this case, we write "-0000".  As far as I'm aware, it should
be parsed equivalently but it mirrors RFC 5322:

  Though "-0000" also indicates Universal Time, it is used to indicate
  that the time was generated on a system that may be in a local time
  zone other than Universal Time and that the date-time contains no
  information about the local time zone.

This is exactly my case.  As you can tell from my emails, I'm not
physically located in a UTC timezone, but my system is in UTC and uses
that for timestamps.  I use UTC because I know and work with people from
around the world and it's more convenient to use an objective standard;
my real time zone is unimportant.  That's materially different than
someone who's located in Reykjavík, where we'd want to write +0000,
since they are physically located in a UTC-equivalent timezone.
-- 
brian m. carlson: Houston, Texas, US