Icingaweb2: It is required that a default timezone has been set using date.timezone

[Al2Klimov]

Expected Behavior

I don't have to set date.timezone as Icinga Web 2 falls back anyway in the rare case that my browser doesn't provide any TZ offset.

Current Behavior

I have to configure it every damn time.

Possible Solution

Replace the error in the setup wizard with a warning.

Steps to Reproduce (for bugs)

Run the setup wizard as usual.

Context

Testing something with a fresh IW2.

Your Environment

The latest bleeding edge hipster stuff from you.

[dnsmichi]

This has been a common error users make for 9+ years, when not required explicitly. I don‘t think this should be made optional again.

[Al2Klimov]

Error? Which error? If there have been an error, then because the first paragraph of this issue didn't apply that time.

[Thomas-Gelf]

Please be extra careful when touching this. Motivation for this requirements was that Linux distros crippled PHP timezone detection in various ways. I can remember that at the time being our main problem was RHEL 6 reporting some weird default value, so there was no good way to detect whether a timezone had been configured. Eventually this is no longer a problem since we dropped support for 5.3 - some research / intensive testing would definitively help.

I'd also love to get rid of this, but once again: please be cautious and very, very careful: this could cause weird problems. That's why we opted for this hard requirement - it allows us to make the assumption that everybody configured a default value.

[Al2Klimov]

If "there [is] no good way to detect whether a timezone had been configured", how can you safely tell that our hard requirement is fulfilled by the user?

[Thomas-Gelf]

Guess no one really remembers all the details, you might want to ask @lippserd, eventually he can. But please believe me - there have been weird annoying issues, and different Linux distributions showed different behavior. Please talk to @lippserd if you have the desire to tackle this, I'd discourage doing so without intensively testing all supported distributions.

[Thomas-Gelf]

As you mentioned this paragraph:

...the rare case that my browser doesn't provide any TZ offset.

Please note that this code also runs on CLI, as a check plugin and in background jobs and daemons. Missing timezone settings might affect components like specific log writer implementations. Every emitted E_NOTICE is deadly.