A tale of excess and lost time. According to py3

A few weeks ago, in our infrastructure, I discovered a small configuration error in the environment variable TZ. The correction of this error upset the fragile balance of bugs in the universe and the RPS graphics for one of the projects in our graphite literally went crazy. I'll tell you how I chased a few hours for several days.

How it all began

The script, which was launched by hand and worked perfectly, threw an error when starting from cron.d. A superficial study of the logs in plain text indicated what was wrong.

#   
$ TZ='' clickhouse-client; echo exit=$?
ClickHouse client version 20.3.2.1.
Connecting to localhost:9000 as user default.
Connected to ClickHouse server version 20.3.2 revision 54433.
Poco::Exception. Code: 1000, e.code() = 0, e.displayText() = Exception: Could not determine time zone from TZ variable value: '': filesystem error: in file_size: Is a directory [/usr/share/zoneinfo] (version 20.3.2.1)
exit=232

Error with us or in the program?

Is the program behavior correct or is it a bug?

The GNU documentation indicates that there are 3 possible formats for an environment variable TZ:

• Format without DST (daylight saving time) std offset. Examples EST+5,GMT+0
• Format with the DST: std offset dst [offset],start[/time],end[/time]. Example EST+5EDT,M3.2.0/2,M11.1.0/2.
• The name of the time zone description file. May begin with a colon :. If the first (or following the colon) character is a slash /, then this must be the absolute path to the file. If not, then /usr/share/zoneinfo/${TZ}.

Why does a ClickHouse client need local time knowledge?

Date DateTime DBMS timestamp, toDateTime('2020-02-02 20:20:20') (, , ) UInt32. , . TZ , , 98% .

, ClickHouse ( Poco) , . .

, . cron.d TZ, . . , 2020-04-15 2020-04-20 .

2020-04-22 ( ): " RPS "

, -, . .

self.now = int(datetime.datetime.utcnow().timestamp())
...
dt = datetime.datetime.strptime(time_str, time_format).utctimetuple()
timestamp = time.mktime(dt)

datetime.utcnow()?

Return the current UTC date and time, with tzinfo=None.
This is like now(), but returns the current UTC date and time, as a naive datetime object. An aware current UTC datetime can be obtained by calling datetime.now(timezone.utc). See also now().
Warning: Because naive datetime objects are treated by many datetime methods as local times, it is preferred to use aware datetimes to represent times in UTC. As such, the recommended way to create an object representing the current time in UTC is by calling datetime.now(timezone.utc).

, UTC, tzinfo=None datetime. .timestamp() UNIX time , UTC. : TZ=UTC

datetime.now().timestamp(). , .timestamp(), datetime.now(timezone.utc)

datetime.utctimetuple()?

datetime.timetuple():
Return time.struct_time such as returned by time.localtime().
datetime.utctimetuple():
If datetime instance d is naive, this is the same as d.timetuple() except that tm_isdst is forced to 0 regardless of what d.dst() returns. DST is never in effect for a UTC time.
If d is aware, d is normalized to UTC time, by subtracting d.utcoffset(), and a time.struct_time for the normalized time is returned. tm_isdst is forced to 0.
Warning: Because naive datetime objects are treated by many datetime methods as local times, it is preferred to use aware datetimes to represent times in UTC; as a result, using utcfromtimetuple may give misleading results. If you have a naive datetime representing UTC, use datetime.replace(tzinfo=timezone.utc) to make it aware, at which point you can use datetime.timetuple().

. time.struct_time, time.mktime(). , python2. , . , UNIX timestamp .

Python, , .

, datetime.strptime().timestamp()

TZ

, . - , - UTC, - , . , .

, RPS :

, , . , .

, :

• , TZ=''
• UTC strptime()
• UTC, strptime()
• strptime()

strptime 2020-04-24T05:31:55+02:00

#!/usr/bin/env python
from datetime import datetime, timezone  # noqa
from time import mktime
def pprint(d: dict):
    for k in d:
        print("{}: {}".format(k, d[k]))
now = {'now': datetime.now(),
       # 'now_tz': datetime.now(timezone.utc), # the same as now for timestamp
       'utcnow': datetime.utcnow()}
now_ts = [int(now[k].timestamp()) for k in now]
now_dict = {k: [now_ts[i], now_ts[i] - now_ts[0]] for i, k in enumerate(now)}
pprint(now_dict)
# pprint(now)
# print('Timestamps in now: {}'.format(set(now_ts)))
print()
ts_c = 1587699115  # the known correct value
time_format = "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z"
time_str = "2020-04-24T05:31:55+02:00"
timetuples = {
    'timetuple': datetime.strptime(time_str, time_format).timetuple(),
    'utctimetuple': datetime.strptime(time_str, time_format).utctimetuple(),
}
ts = {
    'timestamp': [
        int(datetime.strptime(time_str, time_format).timestamp()),
        int(datetime.strptime(time_str, time_format).timestamp()) - ts_c,
    ],
    'timetuple': [
        int(mktime(timetuples['timetuple'])),
        int(mktime(timetuples['timetuple'])) - ts_c,
    ],
    'utctimetuple': [
        int(mktime(timetuples['utctimetuple'])),
        int(mktime(timetuples['utctimetuple'])) - ts_c,
    ],
}
pprint(ts)
# pprint(timetuples)
# print('Timestamps in ts: {}'.format(set(int(v[0]) for v in ts.values())))

#!/usr/bin/env bash
for tz in '' Europe/Moscow UTC Europe/Berlin
do
  date "+==TZ=${tz} %s=="
  TZ=$tz python example.py
  date '+++%s++' -d '2020-04-24T05:31:55+02:00'
done

TZ. , +02:00.

now timestamp . , timetuple + mktime .

==TZ='' 1587914590==
now: [1587914590, 0]
utcnow: [1587914590, 0]
timestamp: [1587699115, 0]
timetuple: [1587706315, 7200] - TZ - UTC
utctimetuple: [1587699115, 0]
++1587699115++

==TZ=Europe/Moscow 1587914590==
now: [1587914590, 0]
utcnow: [1587903790, -10800] - UTC - TZ
timestamp: [1587699115, 0]
timetuple: [1587695515, -3600] - +02:00 - TZ
utctimetuple: [1587688315, -10800] - UTC - TZ
++1587699115++

==TZ=UTC 1587914590==
now: [1587914590, 0]
utcnow: [1587914590, 0]
timestamp: [1587699115, 0]
timetuple: [1587706315, 7200] - +02:00 - UTC
utctimetuple: [1587699115, 0]
++1587699115++

==TZ=Europe/Berlin 1587914590==
now: [1587914590, 0]
utcnow: [1587907390, -7200] - UTC - TZ
timestamp: [1587699115, 0]
timetuple: [1587699115, 0]
utctimetuple: [1587695515, -3600] - UTC - TZ...    DST!
++1587699115++

The wonderful Tikki Schellen reasonably advises : "Do not take time with your bare hands." For me, in the ranking of danger, it fell on one line with DNS. Try to generally avoid it whenever possible.

And at this interesting time I wish to stay healthy. Try to stay at home and if you are suddenly very bored and have nothing to do, you can play games from InnoGames . By the way, we have open vacancies