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

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 02 Oct 2020 15:06:01 -0700

Shengfa Lin <[email-masked]> writes:

>> 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.
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> Jonathan
>
> +1, simpler to understand.

Yup.

> If we have a setting of "core.recordTimeZone", do we need to make it
> as a command option as Junio suggested earlier?

Usually we add command line option --[no-]record-time-zone first
without configuration option when introducing a new features like
this one.  Once the feature proves useful, we'd add a matching
configuration variable for convenience, but leave the command line
option (negative form in this case) so that a configured per-user
default can be overridden as needed.