Silly time stamps

Hi,

This is an example of timestamps are in git:
    tree c67dc912a777ef6198a5c76890ebf11cd8ccc625
    parent 6e527d8e07a80058bf8ac46180e25a9d4cb745eb
    author my name <m@test.org> 1397073956 +0400
    committer my name <m@test.org> 1397073956 +0400

    testing again

As you can see, it presents the timestamp in UNIX format (I suppose it's UTC) plus an additional information which is an offset that describes my time zone.

Now, the way UTC works is that every client is supposed to apply his own offset on it (based on locale stuff) so that the user-interface (let it be CLI or GUI) can print an pretty time format based on his location.

The offset that is used is local to each client. E.g. if it's UTC 10:00, it will look 14:00 (cause +04:00) in my part of the world, while looking as 12:00 in another part of the world (+02:00 time-zone). This time-zone offset is local to the computer based on locale stuff. The only thing that we need is the UTF time stamp (and then anyone can make it look pretty based on where he is living).

Now, the problem is that git shares the UTC time (totally OK) AND my fucking time-zone! Why would anyone give a damn rat's ass about my time-zone? What difference could it make if you know that the clock looked like "14:00" on my part of the world?

This was raised previously[1], but none of the responses are convincing.

One guy was saying here[2] some nonesense like "I'd prefer not to lose the information. If someone has committed a change at 2am, I like to know that it was 2am for _them_. It helps me decide where to look first for the cause of problems. :)"

How about we also modify the time data to augment it with my mood? E.g. "1397073956 +0400 totally_pissed_off".

The same asshole in [2] gave another retarded example that is just less visible to non-humans: "It also helps disambiguate certain comments, especially those involving words or phrases such as 'yesterday' or 'this afternoon'.".

This is equal to say: instead of curing the root cause of the problem (by educating assholes to not use ambiguous time information like "yesterday"), let's fuck the software instead (by encoding useless information here and there).

[1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/52 [2] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/114