Felix Miata <mrmazda <at> earthlink.net> writes: > > AFAIK, Windows is the only OS that has trouble using UTC for the RTC. > > Have you ever used DOS or OS/2? I don't remember ever seeing options at > installation time to choose anything other than local in either one. Same for > W95, W98, WXP & W7. How they were set up initially is how they will remain. The last four are Windows and DOS is the predecessor to Windows. I'm not familiar with OS/2, but from http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/keeping-time-in-os2.html it looks like OS/2 is capable of keeping its RTC in TAI (which AIUI is basically the same as UTC except that TAI doesn't have leap seconds, so TAI is "real time", and UTC is TAI interspersed with leap seconds, so both increase monotonically, but UTC has "jumps"). > > https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/mswish/ut-rtc.html . To avoid that, the time > > used by the RTC should increase monotonically. Also, when people share > > files, if their RTCs are in different time zones, it's impossible to know > > exactly how to interpret a file's timestamps, since they depend on the > > originating PC's time zone. The only way to avoid these problems is for > > everyone to have their RTC set on the same monotonically increasing time, > > and UTC is the natural choice. > > That UTC is the ideal choice for most use cases does not justify making it > the only choice for all installations. This is still FOSS, home of choice and > multiple ways to get things done. All your base are not belong to us yet. UTC (or maybe TAI which some have argued is better) should be ideal for all use cases, if Microsoft ever gets around to fixing Windows. All OSes I know of, even Windows, know how to display local time to the user, who wouldn't have to know or care what the RTC is set to, if Windows wasn't broken. You'd tell it what your local time zone is, it gets either UTC or TAI via NTP, sets the RTC to that, converts from that to your local time, and displays that to you. And as long as you multiboot only between non-Microsoft OSes, it works fine and in that case there is no advantage to having the RTC on local time. The only reason Linux or any other OS needs to support having the RTC on local time for now is as a workaround to coexist with broken Windows. -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
