id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	priority	milestone	component	version	resolution	keywords	cc
90	timestamps: formatting and timezones	Zooko		"Please use ISO-8601, except with ""_"" instead of ""T"" for the separating character for all timestamps.  Please include the ISO-8601 unambiguous timezone indicator (which is either ""Z"" or a number of hours offset from UTC -- I don't know what the standard is for non-integral offsets, but see below).

Next, please consider using UTC times for all timestamps instead of localtimes.  Foolscap is system for remote computation, and the remote end may or may not be in the same timezone as the local end, which may or may not be in the same timezone as the programmer who is looking at it.  A nice, consistent simple way to deal with such things is just not worry as much about how sunny the sky was, and who was awake, in the land where the server lives and just use UTC for everything.

(More seriously, the trade-off is cognitive difficulty of correlating events on a server from human-rhythm events that take place in the same timezone, such as meals and sleeping, vs. the cognitive difficulty of correlating events on a server with events on other computers.  In my experience working in distributed systems, I'm more frequently interested in the latter correlations.)

Here is the related discussion from the Tahoe trac:

http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/326 # use consistent time stamps in logging

Here are some Python implementations of ISO and/or UTC timestamps:

http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/src/allmydata/node.py?rev=2731#L30
http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/src/allmydata/util/time_format.py?rev=2424#L12
http://allmydata.org/trac/pyutil/browser/pyutil/pyutil/time_format.py?rev=93"	enhancement	new	major	undecided	unknown	0.3.0