UNIX reference time of 1970-01-01 00:00 is UTC timezone, not local time zone
I got bitten because in the UK (where one would expect 1970-01-01 00:00
to be UTC 0) some politicians decided to mess around with daylight
savings time from 1968 to 1971; it was permanently BST (+0100). That
means that on my computer the following is true:
$ date --date="1970-01-01 00:00" +"%F %T %z (%Z)"
1970-01-01 00:00:00 +0100 (BST)
This of course means that the --date argument to date is specified in
local time, not UTC. So when the hooks--update script does this:
date=$(date --date="1970-01-01 00:00:00 $ts seconds")
It's actually saying (in my timezone) "1970-01-01 01:00:00 UTC" + $ts.
Clearly this is wrong. The UNIX epoch started at midnight UTC not 1am
UTC.
This leads to the tagged time in hooks--update being shown as one hour
earlier than the true tagged time (in my timezone). The problem would
be worse for other timezones. For a +1300 timezone on 1970-01-01, the
tagged time would be 13 hours earlier. Oops.
The solution is to force the reference time to UTC, which is what this
patch does. In my timezone:
$ date --date="1970-01-01 00:00 +0000" +"%F %T %z (%Z)"
1970-01-01 01:00:00 +0100 (BST)
Much better.
Signed-off-by: Andy Parkins <andyparkins@gmail.com>