POV-Ray / povray

The Persistence of Vision Raytracer: http://www.povray.org/
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
1.35k stars 282 forks source link

Pseudo-variable `now` does not work as intended on Linux machines. #432

Open c-lipka opened 3 years ago

c-lipka commented 3 years ago

On Linux machines, the value returned by now may be based on local time, instead of UTC as documented and intended.

This is due to an undocumented issue in boost::posix_time::microsec_clock::universal_time().

c-lipka commented 3 years ago

Technically, this issue is fixed in v3.8.0, to be released in v3.8.0-beta.2.

However, the bug has highlighted the shortcomings of the current design, in that the typical use cases for the datetime function would be better catered to by a local time based solution. A mechanism should be devised to make local time output available as an intentional feature.