[cvsnt] Sync of two CVS repository placed across two different Timezone

[Tony Hoyle]

On Mon, 13 Oct 2003 13:26:00 +0100, "Peter Crowther"
<Peter.Crowther at melandra.com> wrote:


>Windows 2000's system clock is UTC, and files are timestamped in UTC.
>Are you sure that:

You're thinking of Unix :)   Windows always uses local time as it's
base that's why you set your BIOS clock to local time not UTC.

Win2000 tries to convert back to UTC and manages it most of the time.
Unless your drives are NTFS though you'll lose all the benefit of this
conversion - the FAT time code is basically useless.

>If I recall correctly (I'm not near my CVS server), CVSNT can be
>configured to use the server timestamp at commit, which may work around
>the client problem.  However, if your server clocks are skewed, there's
>not a lot you can do - and the file sync software will probably show the
>same behaviour on non-CVS files.

CVSNT uses UTC throughout - there's some rather hairy code that tries
to convert Windows time to UTC (the MS libraries fail at this
horribly, hence the old 'red files' problem) and this does seem to
work most of the time - especially if you're using NTFS, which already
does the hard work for you (correctly usually)).

If you're using FAT however you rely on the information that the OS
has to do the timezone conversion and there have been instances of
this being wrong (in the UK for example the DST changeover date was a
week out for a long time... fingers crossed for the next changeover).

Tony