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

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Oct 3, 2020, 22:14 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqq5z7r7ya7.fsf@gitster.c.googlers.com>
In-Reply-To: <20201003195325.GL1392312@camp.crustytoothpaste.net>

"brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net> writes:

Show 12 quoted lines

> I'd like to make one suggestion here, and that's that instead of writing
> "+0000" in this case, we write "-0000".  As far as I'm aware, it should
> be parsed equivalently but it mirrors RFC 5322:
>
>   Though "-0000" also indicates Universal Time, it is used to indicate
>   that the time was generated on a system that may be in a local time
>   zone other than Universal Time and that the date-time contains no
>   information about the local time zone.
>
> This is exactly my case.  As you can tell from my emails, I'm not
> physically located in a UTC timezone, but my system is in UTC and uses
> that for timestamps.

What you had in the header of the message I am responding to was:

    Date:   Sat, 3 Oct 2020 19:53:25 +0000

I cannot tell if somebody in the middle rewrote -0000 to +0000, or your original already said +0000 in your message.

> I use UTC because I know and work with people from
> around the world and it's more convenient to use an objective standard;
> my real time zone is unimportant.

It cuts both ways, and there is a small downside, though. As I assume most people are not actively hacking on Git in the early morning say 01am-04am in their local timezone, I may delay my response to a message from a contributor if I notice that the day for that contributor is already over and my message will not be read for some time even if I rushed it. "real time zone is unimportant" may or may not be true. A responder in such a case is actively inconvenienced by the zone information being hidden [*1*].

Having said that.

> That's materially different than
> someone who's located in Reykjavík, where we'd want to write +0000,
> since they are physically located in a UTC-equivalent timezone.

I agree that it would be a good thing to have a way to say "I am not telling which zone the timestamp is from", that can be used to differenciate "This timestamp is in UTC because I am in UTC".

[Footnote]

*1* How much the person feel inconvenienced is very subjective, so
    let's not go into "it's just a small inconvenience---my privacy
    is more valuable" kind of discussion.  The value of privacy is
    subjective in the same way and we shouldn't compare subjective
    things to decide which side must bend their way to accomodate
    the other side.