From: Brett Simmers <bsimmers@...>
Date: 2007-07-04T11:36:48+09:00
Subject: Marshalling a Time loses zone info

I was dealing with a weird problem today that I eventually traced back 
to the fact that marshalling and unmarshalling a Time object will 
implicitly convert it to local time:

t = Time.new
t.utc
s = Marshal.dump t
new_t = Marshal.load s
t.to_s                   # "Wed Jul 04 02:09:05 UTC 2007"
new_t.to_s           # "Tue Jul 03 19:09:05 -0700 2007"

I know that they still represent the same time, but it seems to me like 
the zone is an important part of the state of the object.  Is this 
intentional or a bug?  This was a problem because my app is getting 
objects from a database that's running in UTC.  It gets some Time 
objects from the db adapter and sends them, along with some other data, 
over the network using DRb (which uses Marshal.dump/load).  These are 
then used in another query back to the same database, but the adapter 
(OCI8) ignores the time zone.  As a result, the times it was using in 
the queries would be 7 hours behind what they should be.  I solved it by 
calling .utc on any Time objects that come in over the network to make 
sure everything is UTC, but it was an interesting problem.  I'm using 
1.8.6, I haven't tried it with 1.9 yet. 

-Brett