[Cdash] CTEST_NIGHTLY_START_TIME and daylight savings

[David Cole]

Who needs daylight savings time, anyway?
http://www.kitware.com/blog/home/post/77

(I had been intending to write this last week *before* the change to
daylight savings time.... but your email inspired me to actually kick
it into gear... So: thanks.)

The key is to specify the nightly start time in UTC, and then make
sure that all clients start after that time (but in local time) no
matter what day of the year it is by starting the jobs one hour later
than necessary during half of the year.

I blame it all on default cron / scheduled task management behavior.
You should be able to specify UTC times to those tools so that you can
be universally consistent.


Hope this helps,
David


On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 6:22 PM, Tyler <tyler at cryptio.net> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 09, 2010 at 06:17:30PM -0500, David Cole wrote:
>> The short answer is: express it in UTC instead. And then time things
>> "correctly"... I'll point you to a blog article about this shortly.
>
> Sure, but my local time zone still changes with respect to UTC. If I
> configure the build system to build at 08:00:00 UTC, my Nightly builds
> will come from code checked in at 00:00:00 local time for half the year
> and code checked in at 01:00:00 local time for the other half. This
> seems confusing to me (and when I'm up that late working, the last thing
> I want to be confused about is what time it is in Greenwich).
>
> Is that what other people do? Just let the time float relative to the
> local time zone? I can't think of any other software that acts this way.
>
> Nonetheless, I look forward to the blog pointer.
>
> Thanks,
> tyler
>