[QGIS-Developer] QGIS, DateTime and TimeZones

[Bernd Vogelgesang]

I recently had some issues concerning datetimes.
Like in real life, I had to merge data from different sources, csv and
gpx, with some duplicate entries.
After a while I wondered why I couldn't find those duplicates. For some
reasons, the time values where interpreted differently while merging,
depending on the source and formatting, so I got an offset of 2 hours
for values which should have been identical.

So there seems to be some black magic going on under the hood which I
can't influence when I would not want to change all entries by hand to
make them behave consistently.

Just my 2 cents

Bernd



On 08.09.20 15:40, Richard Duivenvoorde wrote:
> Hi Devs,
>
> I was hitting some timezone issues when I received some csv data in which there are timestamps like:
> "2020-07-25 20:21:38 UTC"
> Apparently if you read this into QGIS, the UTC IS interpreted, and you get a DateTime in your data which is (in my case) -2 hours(CET) off (well in some parts of QGIS)
>
> This plays havoc if you for example are going to use this data in the timecontroller or expressions, see
> https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/issues/38647
>
> So I think that now the TimeController is part of QGIS, and people will start to play with Time-based data more and more (from TimeZone aware datasets like csv and postgres) we will run into issues like above.
>
> Is there something we can do to make QGIS timezone aware?
> OR should we stay far away from it (timezones are hell)...
> OR should we wait with it after QGIS 4
>
> Regards,
>
> Richard Duivenvoorde
>
>
>
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