fd.o trash specification - DeletionDate timezone

[David Faure]

On Tuesday 08 April 2008, Karl Chen wrote:
> 
> Hi, this is a comment about
> http://www.ramendik.ru/docs/trashspec.html,
> http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/trash-spec .
> 
> The current Trash spec (version 0.7) says:
> * The key "DeletionDate" contains the date and time when the
>   file/directory was trashed. The date and time are to be in the
>   YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss format (see RFC 3339). The time zone should
>   be the user's (or filesystem's) local time.
> 
> I applaud the choice of YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss over the despicable
> ctime() format.

:-)

> One suggestion I have: use UTC and/or specify the timezone. 
> 
> Files may live in the trash can across daylight savings changes.
> A laptop or filesystem's local timezone can change as the user
> moves his laptop or removable media across timezone boundaries.
> Network file systems can be in different timezones from the
> client.
> 
> I believe that using the local timezone without specifying the
> timezone may cause problems.

Indeed.
Although this is just for informing the user when he/she's browsing
the trash, this could be a minor source of bugs.

> In the language of RFC 3339, the current format of the
> DeletionDate field is "4.4. Unqualified Local Time".  I propose
> that the format of DeletionDate be changed to "4.2. Local Offsets"
> (e.g. 1996-12-19T16:39:57-08:00) or "4.1. Coordinated Universal
> Time" (e.g. 1996-12-20T00:39:57Z), i.e. standard RFC 3339.

I agree with this proposal.

Alexander, do you?
I don't want to start writing out stuff that would break your implementation :-)

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).