establishing a timezone for FDP

[Patrick Barnes]

Karsten Wade wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-10-21 at 15:49 +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
>   
>> On Fri, 2005-10-21 at 07:43 -0700, Karsten Wade wrote:
>>     
>>> 24 October 17:00 Easter Time
>>>
>>> Does this make sense?
>>>       
>> Make sense? It has absolutely no meaning to me at all.
>>     
>
> Well, that's fine, and we can just as easily all say UTC.
>
> You know why I do this practice, not because it is right or good, but
> because it resolves most easily in the greatest percentage of Red Hat
> brains.
>
> I know, I know, the higher calling is to teach the best practice.
>
> What else I want to know is, what is the right time to set a deadline?
>
> * One minute before midnight
> * Midnight
> * Noon
> * COB in UTC
> * Other
>
> From when do you start counting days?
>
> There has to be some balance between intuitive and always having to
> calculate your local timezone and how many real days it is to you.  Is
> this possible, given our limitations?
>
> - Karsten
>   
I certainly agree with David on this one.  UTC works great.  As far as
deadlines, 23:59 UTC is pretty standard and also works well.  The date
can also be easily tracked with UTC.  Once someone learns the
appropriate offset, all conversions become easy.  Since daylight savings
does not affect UTC, that hassle is eliminated.  Since different regions
treat daylight savings differently, that causes a lot of confusion. 
Conversions against UTC are going to be a lot easier for anyone outside
of U.S. Eastern Time.  Even if a large number of participants are in
U.S. Eastern Time, there are many who are not.  If we make a habit of
using U.S. Eastern Time now, it may also complicate things in the future
as the participation becomes even more widespread.  Although the
conversion is easy for me (+/- 1 hour), what about participants in
Australia?  India?  There's no reason to make them learn U.S. Eastern
Time rules.  It is easy enough for people in the eastern U.S. to learn
when to adjust +/- 4/5 hours.  Any time we must specify a local time, it
is also best to specify the offset (eg. RFC-2822: Fri, 21 Oct 2005
23:59:00 -0400).  Let's stick to global standards as much as possible.

The same applies to other regional considerations.  ISO dates
(YYYY-MM-DD), common currencies (U.S.D. & Euro), metric measurements,
etc. should be preferred.  We adhere to standards in our software, why
not our communications?

-- 
Patrick "The N-Man" Barnes
nman64 at n-man.com

www.n-man.com
-- 



-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-docs-list/attachments/20051021/865dbba2/attachment.sig>