Re: Time zone handling

["Simon Coulter" <shc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello David,

You wrote:
>Speaking of which, does anyone actually set the QUTCOFFSET system value?

I do of course -- why are you not surprised?  It should be done anyway
because running as +00:00 is simply wrong unless your system is physically
located in the UK, France, etc. but also many TCP products, especially
e-mail, require it to be set correctly.

>On a similar note ... how do you deal with a system that is used by
>multiple people in multiple time zones?

        a) build your own timezone manager based on some attribute associated
with the user
        b) use LPAR

>Is there a local job UTCOFFSET variable available?

No.  It's global to the system.  It would be nice if it were a SBSD
attribute.  Locale objects don't help here either.  They should because they
contain a timezone value but it doesn't seem to be used.

One only hopes that Rochester fix the dumb** decision to use local time for
system time on the next version change (VRM610) and correctly use GMT/UTC for
system time with QUTCOFFSET indicating local time difference and also give us
the ability to override that difference on SBSD, JOBD, USRPRF, etc.  (or make
locale timezone settings work).  It would be difficult to make this
bullet-proof when you consider a user who may sign-on from different
timezones because they travel a lot.

**dumb in my view but probably chosen to make life easy for the target users
of Rochester systems who generally aren't the most technical fish in the
barrel.

Regards,
Simon Coulter.
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