threads / patch / 6539

patch, 2 partsUNIX reference time of 1970-01-01 00:00 is UTC timezone, not local time zone

Subject: [PATCH 1/2] UNIX reference time of 1970-01-01 00:00 is UTC timezone, not local time zone

## tl;dr

3 messages between Jan 26, 2007 and Jan 26, 2007. Diffs are folded; open one to read it.

replies: 2people: 2as markdown or json

Andy Parkins· Jan 26, 2007, 08:58 UTC · lore

I got bitten because in the UK (where one would expect 1970-01-01 00:00 to be UTC 0) some politicians decided to mess around with daylight savings time from 1968 to 1971; it was permanently BST (+0100). That means that on my computer the following is true:

$ date --date="1970-01-01 00:00" +"%F %T %z (%Z)" 1970-01-01 00:00:00 +0100 (BST)

This of course means that the --date argument to date is specified in local time, not UTC. So when the hooks--update script does this:

date=$(date --date="1970-01-01 00:00:00 +0000 $ts seconds")

It's actually saying (in my timezone) "1970-01-01 01:00:00 UTC" + $ts. Clearly this is wrong. The UNIX epoch started at midnight UTC not 1am UTC.

This leads to the tagged time in hooks--update being shown as one hour earlier than the true tagged time (in my timezone). The problem would be worse for other timezones. For a +1300 timezone on 1970-01-01, the tagged time would be 13 hours earlier. Oops.

The solution is to force the reference time to UTC, which is what this patch does. In my timezone:

$ date --date="1970-01-01 00:00 +0000" +"%F %T %z (%Z)" 1970-01-01 01:00:00 +0100 (BST)

Much better.
Signed-off-by: Andy Parkins <andyparkins@gmail.com>
---
 templates/hooks--update |    2 +-
 1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)
Show changes to templates/hooks--update +1 −1
diff --git a/templates/hooks--update b/templates/hooks--update
index 9863a80..81f706f 100644
--- a/templates/hooks--update
+++ b/templates/hooks--update
@@ -46,7 +46,7 @@ then
 		if [ "$ref_type" = tag ]; then
 			eval $(git cat-file tag $3 | \
 				sed -n '4s/tagger \([^>]*>\)[^0-9]*\([0-9]*\).*/tagger="\1" ts="\2"/p')
-			date=$(date --date="1970-01-01 00:00:00 $ts seconds" +"$date_format")
+			date=$(date --date="1970-01-01 00:00:00 +0000 $ts seconds" +"$date_format")
 			echo "Tag '$tag' created by $tagger at $date"
 			git cat-file tag $3 | sed -n '5,$p'
 			echo
-- 
1.5.0.rc2.g017f3
Andy Parkins· Jan 26, 2007, 09:43 UTC · re: Andy Parkins · lore

Re: [PATCH 1/2] UNIX reference time of 1970-01-01 00:00 is UTC timezone, not local time zone

On Friday 2007 January 26 08:58, Andy Parkins wrote:
> This of course means that the --date argument to date is specified in
> local time, not UTC.  So when the hooks--update script does this:
>
> date=$(date --date="1970-01-01 00:00:00 +0000 $ts seconds")

Bugger. This description is wrong. I've shown the fixed version not the original. This line should have read

 date=$(date --date="1970-01-01 00:00:00 $ts seconds")
Sorry - patch was fine, message needs that change to make sense though.
Andy
-- 
Dr Andy Parkins, M Eng (hons), MIEE
andyparkins@gmail.com
Simon 'corecode' Schubert· Jan 26, 2007, 17:49 UTC · re: Andy Parkins · lore

Re: [PATCH 1/2] UNIX reference time of 1970-01-01 00:00 is UTC timezone, not local time zone

Andy Parkins wrote:
> $ date --date="1970-01-01 00:00" +"%F %T %z (%Z)"
> 1970-01-01 00:00:00 +0100 (BST)
nice observation.  yet, my system doesn't even have date --date=.  regarding the idea to provide a generic nice hook, it should be considered to convert this usage to a standards-conforming way.
cheers
  simon
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