Moon activity should detect if timezone is GMT or UTC and warn nicely

[greenfeld]

The Moon activity seems to do some timezone specific calculations. However, most XOs (and possibly SoaS) default to GMT or UTC.

Presuming these calculations are correct, if we detect that we are running in one of these time zones, we should warn the user nicely of what we found and to check their time zone. However, a user might actually be in a location where this is valid, so this cannot be an outright error.

Seen in Moon 11 in OLPC 11.2.0 os13.

[greenfeld]

Another alternative might be to include the abbreviation or full name for timezone used somewhere in the sidebar. But there isn't much room for that on an XO's screen with the current layout.

[garycmartin]

Could you describe the actual bug you are seeing? Moon was tested carefully to work in different time zones from around the world, the only requirement is that you have your clock set correctly to the current time. Also GMT == UTC so I'm not quite sure what the title of this ticket is trying to say.

[greenfeld]

The "bug" really isn't a Moon bug, but rather an underlying part of how Sugar (and in some cases the underlying OS) behaves.

Sugar 0.84 & 0.90 (as seen on XOs and F14 SoaS) seem to like overriding the current time zone by default and set it to GMT. So all Sugar activities (including Terminal and Moon) think the current time zone is GMT. These builds of Sugar let you set things to GMT+/- an offset (so GMT-3 is a valid timezone), but a user has to go in and manually do this, so we suspect most users do not do this. Sugar only shows relative times in most places anyway, so users are not likely to notice unless they are using a Calendar activity or similar.

Sugar 0.92 is a bit smarter about this (I'm not certain to what extent), and can use the timezone files like America/New_York, etc. in addition to the GMT+/- ones. Still, stock XO builds default to UTC (or maybe an unset timezone?) for the underlying OS, so that's what Sugar defaults to.

Sticking with GMT on the underlying OS results in Moon giving offset result times to what a local user might expect. And this is hidden from users since Moon doesn't hint at what timezone is in use, or state what it thinks the local time is.

For example, Moon tells me that the next full moon is "Sat Mar 19 14:10:00 2011" for an XO where I set Sugar to use my local time zone, but "Sat Mar 19 18:10:00 2011" for an XO defaulting to UTC.

[garycmartin]

Fixed in git by  http://git.sugarlabs.org/moon/mainline/commit/de6605cdf3b4638c57600813233872a61f959d7e should have a new Moon release with it in soon. The date strings now include the timezone by default (UTC, BST etc) at the cost of making the information panel a little wider. Will likely also include showing the current date/time in a future enhancement release.