Re: [ISSUE] Stop accessing, storing, and sharing the user's time zone

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Dec 5, 2019, 17:43 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqwobazmzp.fsf@gitster-ct.c.googlers.com>
In-Reply-To: <047b01d5ab92$159a8240$40cf86c0$@nexbridge.com>

"Randall S. Becker" <rsbecker@nexbridge.com> writes:

> .... I currently am
> running a repository located at UTC+2, with developers at
> UTC-5. It is driving us a bit wonky. I would rather see only UTC.

If "seeing" is the primary reason (i.e. you want to compare times your people worked on their commits), you can always do that on the display side (e.g. "git log --date=local"). It is not a good excuse to advocate for information loss.

I also feel that TZ being PII is not particularly a brilliant argument against recording TZ---of course it is PII, so are the committer e-mail address and the committer name. Those who want to hide can hide but in order to keep track of provenance who did what when, we do record them.

As you can guess from the above reasoning, I am not fundamentally opposed to introducing user.tz to complement existing user.name and user.email configuration variables.