Re: Time

In message <Pine.SUN.3.91.960411143655.217A-100000@huygens>, Magnus Mengelbier 
writes:
>On Wed, 3 Apr 1996, Daniel DuBois wrote:
[...GMT or local time?...]
>I suspect it would be easiest to let the logger choose.  If that is the 
>case, I would probably prefer that information as to GMT or local be 
>given somewhere in the log.  A reference to time zone in the log preamble 
>or including the zone stamp next to the time reference, 1304GMT.  If no 
>reference is given to the time zone, there is a problem if we combine 
>logs in an analysis.

If the timezone does not appear with the timestamp there needs to be
some way to indicate a timezone change (EDT to EST when daylight savings
ends for example).  Also I don't think there is an easy way to map
the text abrevation (such as EDT) to GMT offsets, so if timezones are
allowed I think we should specify them as an offset from GMT rather then
text abrevations.

Of corse if we just require the use of GMT we solve the whole problem.
At a cost of some dirrect readability.  Which is what I would recomend.

(then again if it were up to me we would be logging seconds since some
date -- the nominal start of WWW, or the Unix epoch, or some such.  
Since I seldom look dirrectly at logs, but my programs frequently do.
And if my programs arn't throwing away the day the first thing they do
is convert it into seconds since the epoch!  In fact the log format I
am currently using merely includes seconds since the epoch.  When I
am looking through the logs by hand I either convert them to the 
"standard" log format, or I use a command line utility to expand the
dates.  However since the extended logging format looks like I can
define an extra set of time fields with whatever format I like I'll
be happy enough to have somewhat larger log files (storing all dates
twice), and have my programs run faster then programs that use the
normal date field.)

Received on Thursday, 11 April 1996 10:34:51 UTC