[OASIS Issue Tracker] Commented: (CAMP-33) Time zones and timestamps

[OASIS Issues Tracker <workgroup_mailer@lists.oasis-open.org>]

    [ http://tools.oasis-open.org/issues/browse/CAMP-33?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=31886#action_31886 ] 

Tobias Kunze  commented on CAMP-33:
-----------------------------------

UTC has the massive advantage that it is linear. I.e. no missing or duplicate times as in other zones that have DST--which is why it's used as time reference e.g. in Unix epochs and other. Requiring it would support some of the use cases above. Requiring the user to do the math makes coordinated debugging unduly difficult IMO. And leaving the math to a client UI ignores the CLI case, which is quite common during debugging or even firefighting. The use case for giving both, UTC and local time, is convenience.

I agree that location is a different issue.

> Time zones and timestamps
> -------------------------
>
>                 Key: CAMP-33
>                 URL: http://tools.oasis-open.org/issues/browse/CAMP-33
>             Project: OASIS Cloud Application Management for Platforms (CAMP) TC
>          Issue Type: Improvement
>          Components: Spec
>            Reporter: Tobias Kunze 
>            Priority: Trivial
>
> We may want to standardize on a time zone for timestamps. E.g. http://tools.oasis-open.org/issues/browse/CAMP-32 shows a JSON response with a local time (-08:00):
>     {
>        "uri" : "http://slc03lgx.us.oracle.com/campSrv/Assembly/9";,
>        "name" : "/examples",
>        "description" : null,
>        "created" : "2012-11-14T08:33-0800",
>        "tags": []
>        ...
>     }
> The questions are
>     1. Should the PaaS return
>         a. Client local time
>         b. Server local time
>         c. UTC
>         d. some other time, such as the account owner's (e.g. corporate headquarters)?
>     2. Should the time zone be client-selectable?
> Use cases:
>     A. I manage two PaaS, one in Singapur, one in Ireland. I was firefighting at 4am when my pager went off and then made some more changes around 9am. I want to see all operations on my dashboard in one local time so I don't have to do mental gymnastics correlating Singapur times with Ireland.
>     B. My PaaS provider in Virginia sent me an outage notice for 6:07am - 6:23am EDT. I am in Arizona which I don't even know the time zone of. Checking the management command history, I'd prefer them to be in server local time (EDT).
>     C. My company is headquartered in Johannesburg. My PaaS provider is in Tokyo. I am on assignment in China. I do NOT want the provider to be "smart" and bombard me with corporate HQ time. I'd like to get times in China time, or at least in UTC so I can think in simple offsets.
> It seems to me that
>     * For A,
>         - 1a is preferred but requires 2
>         - 1b should never be the default
>         - 1c is acceptable since I can manage one simple addition/subtraction
>         - 1d is unacceptable
>     * For B,
>         - 1a should not be the default
>         - 1b is preferred but (from A above) requires 2
>         - 1c is acceptable, as above
>         - 1d is unacceptable
>     * For C,
>         - 1a, 1b, 1c are the same as for A
>         - 1d is unacceptable by definition

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