[pheasantquiff]

While I understand the point about displaying a time in a given timezone (output/strftime)

I don't see how specifying a timezone on a epoch count makes any sense (input/strptime).

A 'number of seconds since epoch' (%s) is a _duration_, not a time. It makes no sense to attach a time zone to it. (This seems to have been the initial response from the project maintainer).

From the original article the reported "bug" is about _parsing_ an epoch duration, not about displaying a time.

DateTime.strptime('0 +0100', '%s %z')

Probably I am missing something but I've re-read the original article and I cannot see this point addressed directly (examples are given but they have to do with displaying/output, not parsing).

[felipec]

You can argue that attaching a time zone to a `%s` doesn't make sense, but a lot of people do it, and more importantly: it doesn't hurt.

If you do `Time.strptime('0 +0100', '%s %z').to_i` you get the correct result: "0". That is: the number of seconds since the epoch is correctly parsed. The time zone is extra information that doesn't affect `%s` in any way. In other words: it's orthogonal.