Calculate timezone offset automatically

[freixas]

I've had some problems with the timezone offset, mainly due to the fact that it doesn't take Daylight Savings Time into account. I've seen some other bug reports/feature requests for that.

What I'd like to see is if you would be willing to add an automatic timezone offset calculation. Dreamweaver does this by creating a new file on the server, getting its creation time/date, deleting the file and comparing the time/date with the local time/date. It's a pretty simple procedure that would make life a lot easier.

Of course, it wouldn't hurt if you could auto-adjust for daylight savings time as well. If not, the auto-timezone calculation would need to be repeated at least once per day.

Thanks.

[ci-dev]

In FileZilla 3 (beta) timezone offset can be configured on a per-server setting for each site manager item. Auto-adjusting for DST is not possible, just because there is no way for FileZilla to know in which country the server is located. Some countries do have DST, while others don't and in countries like the USA, it even depends in the federal state.

[freixas]

Thanks for responding, Alexander.

I appreciate the problem with DST, but I think calculating the timezone offset automatically is still possible. Note:

* Calculating the timezone offset is *not* the same as automatically adjusting for DST. Either one would solve my problem. This enhancement request is for automatically calculating the timezone offset.

* Dreamweaver already uses the technique I described above and it works well.

On the separate issue of auto-adjusting for DST:

* If you use the Dreamweaver technique, you will auto-adjust for DST as a side-effect (assuming you calculate the offset at least once a day for each server you connect to).

* I'm not particularly familiar with the basics of the Window OS or of FTP, so excuse my ignorance. On Windows, it appear possible to get a file's modification time in UTC. I don't know if FTP reports times in UTC, but my server appears to (creating a file with the FileZilla time offset set to 0 returns a creation date in UTC). If both these statements are true, it seems that comparing file times would not require manually setting a time offset. If only some FTP programs return a UTC time, you could at least enable this feature for the ones that do. And you can test whether an FTP connection reports time in UTC by creating a file or directory on the server and checking the creation time against the PC's current UTC time.

Bottom line: This is just an enhancement request and you may decide not to pursue. But you do have a choice--auto timezone offset calculations are quite feasible. You can, if you like, offer options to enable/disable this feature and use the old manual offset, since there is a performance hit in calculating the offset. Perhaps the user could also choose how often the offset is checked (per connection).

Thanks.

[codesquid]

Will be implemented in 3.0.3

[freixas]

I'm a little late at responding, but thanks, Tim, for taking this on.