Re: time zone and UTC issue [rant]
On 28 November 2012 09:04, Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf@rocketmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 2012-11-28 at 08:45 -0800, unruh wrote:
>> In linux.debian.user, you wrote:
>> > On Wed, 2012-11-28 at 08:44 -0300, Eike Lantzsch wrote:
>> >> Yep. Unfortunately Microsoft never learned in > 25 years that the
>> >> world has more time zones than they might have imagined in DOS-times.
>> >
>> > They did and as I already explained, I want to have the local time for
>> > the BIOS too.
>>
>> Why? Linux is designed to run the system time on UTC and to always
>> interpret the time using /etc/localtime, usually into localtime. All
>> filestamps are raw in UTC but interpreted into localtime. It is just
>> silly to have the rtc/bios clock on localtime, and causes problems and
>> has absolutely no advantages.
>
> If I save BIOS settings as a file and the hwclock is set to UTC, the
> files don't get the German time. The BIOS is the BIOS, it's neither
> Windows, I don't use Windows, but nor the BIOS is Linux, so Linux can't
> "translate" UTC to local time, when I save BIOS settings.
So you spend most of your time in your BIOS? Then you save your
settings and compare that file to previous settings? And then you go
back and do it again? And again? Is that really how you spend your
time? :-) That seems unlikely. So why do you care?
> Under Linux I never noticed any disadvantage, when the hwclock is set to
> local time. Why should there be issues?
By and large, I don't think you will see any issues. Assuming you have
a proper time zone set, your computer will repeat an hour every year.
That might cause problems (if your computer is on during that hour).
But these problems are known so software might work around it. Lots of
people dual boot with Windows (which forces them to use local time) so
you should be okay.
As others have mentioned: UNIX uses UTC. That's the smart thing to do
because it's reliable (independent of time zones and summer/winter
time) and every timestamp is fixed. By using local time you are
swimming against the current but I don't think the current is all that
strong. :-) It just seems to me that doing something that is
suboptimal for the sake of a BIOS' settings file's timestamp is a bit
silly.
Reply to: