This is disappointing.

To summarize, Ruby’s Time class has a bug in its zone method. The example is simple:

tz = ENV['TZ']
ENV['TZ'] = 'Africa/Luanda'
t = Time.now
puts t.zone
ENV['TZ'] = 'Australia/Lord_Howe'
puts t.zone

This outputs:

WAT
WAT

So far so good. But look what happens when I add a single line to the program, foo = t.to_s:

tz = ENV['TZ']
ENV['TZ'] = 'Africa/Luanda'
t = Time.now
puts t.zone
ENV['TZ'] = 'Australia/Lord_Howe'
foo = t.to_s
puts t.zone

The result changes:

WAT
LHST

This is clearly wrong. Changing the $TZ environment variable and stringifying the object should not change the underlying value of any of the object’s attributes. The Time object should remember the value of the time zone when it is initialized, and should never change.

Unfortunately, The Ruby core developers (or at least the owner of the bug report) feel that, since Time relies on the system C API, and since time zones are a PITA, it’s not worth it to change this behavior. The downside, however, is that you cannot rely on Time zones to ever be correct unless you’re very, very careful.

Personally, in my subclass of Time, I took care of stashing the time zone at object instantiation as a workaround for this bug. It seemed reasonable to me, and I was just surprised that the idea was rejected by the Ruby developers.

What do you think?

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