WeBWorK Problems

Using and displaying dates in current timezone?

Using and displaying dates in current timezone?

by Alasdair McAndrew -
Number of replies: 0
I have set my timezone to be "Australia/Melbourne", and my OS (Ubuntu) is OK with it:

$ date
Wed Apr 1 10:53:56 AEDT 2015

And I've set that time zone in site.conf, site.conf.dist, but the times in WeBWorK keep displaying in EST. I wonder if the problem may be that Perl isn't picking up the local timezone somehow? Again, from the OS shell:

$ perl -MDateTime -le 'print DateTime->now->strftime("%a %b %d at %l:%M%P %Z")'
Tue Mar 31 at 11:55pm UTC

$ perl -MDateTime::TimeZone::Australia::Melbourne -le 'print DateTime->now->strftime("%a %b %d at %l:%M%P %Z")'
Tue Mar 31 at 11:58pm UTC

$ perl -MDateTime -le 'print DateTime->now(time_zone=>"Australia/Melbourne")->strftime("%a %b %d at %l:%M%P %Z")'
Wed Apr 01 at 10:59am EST

The only one correct is the last one, and even then the timezone, as reported by "%Z", is wrong.

What happens is that if I set a due date, say 11.59pm on a Sunday, then WeBWorK translates it into an EST date and time. On a "Set Detail" page, where I was opening up a problem set to some students, the "User Values" for the answers due is "04/14/2015 at 05:59am EST", and the "Class Values" (the original time) is are "03/18/2015 at 03:59pm EST".

I don't know if these are the right times or now, but I remain very confused, and so do my students, as I'm never sure, when I enter a date and time, what the system is going to do with it.

What can I do to ensure that all date and time management in WeBWorK - including both entering and displaying time - is done in my local timezone?

Many thanks,
Alasdair