Re: [PATCH v4 2/2] gitweb: introduce localtime feature

From: Kevin Cernekee <cernekee@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 20, 2011, 23:44 UTC
Message-ID: <AANLkTikSDAuvq-Bbw4T8KaenXQu11+HyVs0oA8K=0q5r@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <4D8681CF.3060005@eaglescrag.net>

On Sun, Mar 20, 2011 at 3:38 PM, J.H. <warthog9@eaglescrag.net> wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> I'd argue there are two types of "local" time that anyone using gitweb
> would be looking for (particularly if this is called local time)
>
> 1) Time Local to the observer:  Specifically I don't care where every
> other commit has taken place, I want to know what time it was in my
> preferred time zone (local time zone likely)
>
> 2) Time local to the project:  There will be instances where a project
> is based in a specific time zone (home office perhaps?) and you will
> want to see the commits from that perspective.

That is probably true for distributed projects, but many software projects are handled entirely at one location so there is only one timezone of interest. My goal was to make it easy to support this case.

I have no particular objection to implementing a more comprehensive solution, but my gut feeling is that it would be harder to push the changes upstream (and would have no direct benefit for my local gitweb installation).

I also figured that if nobody had done this by now, the demand is weak and it maybe doesn't warrant a huge amount of effort.

>               - Local Time (could easily default to this and
>                 JavaScript can detect that from the browser)

In my case it would be best to have a way to default to the browser's local time. Would there be a way to set this default on the server side?

My group has switched to Git, but most other groups in the company are using other SCM systems. I frequently send gitweb links to non-Git users, and want to make their experience as intuitive as possible. So, it would be best if the correct timezone was automatically selected.

>       - Won't break bots / scripts that may be crawling the pages or
>         reading the rss feeds (because the timestamps will all be the
>         same assuming it doesn't try to render the javascript)

FWIW, my latest patches did not change the format of the RSS/Atom feeds.

If we are worried about breaking bots that scrape the regular HTML pages, that ties our hands in a lot of other ways.

> If you are interested I can bang that out tomorrow (shouldn't take
> long), but I would *MUCH* rather see this done via JavaScript than to
> muddy up the backend with multiple timezones and such.

OK.  I can help test/improve the implementation if you post a prototype.

Thanks.