buildbot: set the clock to UTC

[mojca (Mojca Miklavec)]

I would find it very useful to see the clock on the buildbot being set to UTC.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

Looks like we can ​set the buildbot timezone when starting buildbot and don't have to change the timezone of the buildmaster's OS itself.

[mojca (Mojca Miklavec)]

That sounds even better. I was looking for a configure option without success.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

Buildmaster is now being started with TZ=UTC. The waterfall view seems to be respecting that at least.

Does this look good enough or should we try to start the buildworkers with that setting as well? I'm not sure if that would actually do anything.

The MacPorts logs on the workers do still contain embedded timestamps that MacPorts puts there; if we wanted those to be UTC we probably really would have to set the system timezone to UTC on the buildworkers (which would be ok).

[mojca (Mojca Miklavec)]

Thank you. The main issues seems to be resolved. All the pages generated by the buildbot which I checked look OK and are much easier to interpret now.

I'm sure that programs that hardcode the build time (which is something they shouldn't do) will keep encoding the wrong time, but this is not an issue at all. I also saw

DEBUG: fetch phase started at Mon Jan  2 05:38:03 CST 2017

but would not worry too much either.

So: yes, it looks good enough to me, thank you very much.

I would leave it up to you whether or not to change the time on the build slaves. If you would set them up from scratch, I would vote for UTC, but I don't think it's worth spending any extra time fixing that now (unless you really want to or if there will be any unexpected consequences with the new/planned build jobs for syncing portindex, distfiles etc.).

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

I went ahead and changed the buildworker system clocks to UTC using:

sudo ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/UTC /etc/localtime

That should fix any dates and times in the buildbot logs.