While busying myself with the way date/time things are handled inside Moodle (mainly to sort out the DST nightmare), I 've come to the tentative conclusion that:
date() and gmdate() interpret timestamps without taking the possible use of DST into account, while strftime() and gmstrftime() DO take the web server's DST settings into account
This is based on my own tests and the (not quite clear) comments that exist in the PHP documentation for the above functions. If this is true, then obviously each and every strftime() call in Moodle should be converted to the equivalent date() call. Otherwise, a parameter unknown at coding time (the DST settings of the user's web server) enters the calculations and makes the resulting date... non-deterministic. The core function usergetdate() currently suffers from this, among others.
Can anyone confirm this to add some confidence to what I 'm doing?
