On the other hand I'm very practical and say: Use
the
local time, but follow common Unix practice. This problem
is not new. Unix systems keep track of local time and
universal time and it's not too hard to get any kind
of time out of a Unix system.
That's true, except that the PHP language does not have a
gmtime() function. That's the main reason the code was
written the way it is now. I could work around it getting
local time and converting myself, with the local timezone
set somewhere, but that's not very Unix-like. I'll probably
just take the easy way out and set the server to GMT.
What are you saying? Are you unaware that Unix systems
count the time in seconds since 1970 and derive all
other further knowledge of date and time from that?
(Of course then the next question is: does the system
keep time in seconds since 1970-01-01 UTC or any other
local time...?)
Either, or neither, depending on the whim of the OS vendor.