Stas, The problem before was that there was no 1 certain date setting. For example on your machine IDT worked, on mine "Israel/Tel Aviv" and for Derick Asia/Tel_Aviv was the working name for the same timezone. So when designing an app to run on different servers the developer will have to find out all these different names for the same thing.
With the date extension there is one unchanging list (even for win32 users) that will always be constant. So once you determine the desired timezone name you use it without being concerned about system's TZ settings. Yes, initially there will be some short-term pain in converting existing apps, but for the long term it'll provide a robust and portable solution. If we add "legacy" flag or INI setting, I feel that we'd be taking a step backwards in terms of making applications portable. Ilia -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
