Add Support for Time Zones about zfsnap HOT 9 OPEN

I think this is overkill

from zfsnap.

If the smallest granularity of a TTL was 1 day, then I would be inclined to agree. However, because zfsnap does support very short TTLs (down to the second), I think the lack of timezone support could be problematic for some use-cases during DST switchover.

However, I never use a TTL of less than 2 weeks, so I don't care if I lose an hour. I won't be working on this issue any time soon, and created it mostly in case someone else came along who was motivated to work on such support.

If such a feature is added, it would be good to have a flag to enable or disable adding TZ info, for those who don't want their snapshot names cluttered.

from zfsnap.

In 2 years, I haven't had a single complain about DTS (just saying)

from zfsnap.

I'd like to complain. My inbox was filled this morning with error messages of the form:

cannot create snapshot 'tank/home@2014-10-26_02.00.01--1d': dataset already exists
no snapshots were created

It took me a while to figure out the problem was due to the TZ change last night. It would be nice to fix this.

from zfsnap.

UTC is the way to go (for zfsnap)

from zfsnap.

Personally, I like local time. For instance, I sometimes want to know the state of a file as of this morning. Having to change from UTC to local time is an annoyance. Including the current TZ, would solve this problem. For instance, in Germany, you could do TIMESTAMP+CET for normal time and TIMESTAMP+CEST for DST.

from zfsnap.

@nwalfield I agree that it would be convenient to have TZ info stored in the snapshot name, but IIRC, it would be problematic to support (but certainly not impossible). It would require a change in the snapshot name format, and likely the feature would be limited to GNU's version of date. It's amazing how few of date's features are portable.

---Alex

from zfsnap.

FreeBSD's version of date seems to support outputting time zones.

https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=date%281%29&sektion=

from zfsnap.

@nwalfield Outputting is the easy part. It's reading in that info later and using/converting it in a way that can be compared to the current date-time. Note how the "-f" option doesn't support TZ info. :-/

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