Dates UTC + offset is non meaningful...?

[Benoit Boissinot]

On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 6:05 PM, Jason Harris <jason at jasonfharris.com> wrote:
>
> On Nov 15, 2010, at 3:38 PM, Matt Mackall wrote:
>>
>> The above timestamp is (local time, offset from UTC)
>
> Yeah... the question was not about isodate format which is normally something like
> YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss + offset. Its clear one needs the offset here since my 2pm
> here is different than your 2pm in the states. Thats why isodates have an offset. All well and good.
>
>> vs Mercurial's (UTC
>> time, offset from UTC), which means doing absolute comparisons is
>> slightly easier with Mercurial.
>
> But thats just it, what does UTC_time + offset_from_UTC time mean? I had originally
> added them together and this is what caused my bug. What purpose does the offset_from_UTC serve?

You need to know the offset to compute the local time. If you don't
care about local time, ignore the offset.

regards,

Benoit