Milestone "Due On" field defaults to 7:00 when set by v3 API

[mister-y]

When I create or update a Milestone using the v3 API, the “Due On” field always defaults to the last 7:00 before the date-time that I specify. For example, if I set “Due On” to “2018-05-14T01:00:00Z”, the value of the field actually ends up being “2018-05-13T07:00:00Z” (so 7:00 the day before). If I set “Due On” to “2018-05-14T08:00:00Z”, the value of the field ends up being “2018-05-14T07:00:00Z” (7:00 earlier that day).

Can someone confirm that this is the expected behaviour? Is there any way to get the field to use the exact date-time value that I entered?

[mister-y]

Bit of an update - sometimes it sets the date back to the latest instance of 7:00 AM; other times it goes back to 8:00 AM. It seems it depends on whether you’re in DST or not.

I’m hoping to get a bit of clarification on how exactly this works.

[lee-dohm]

This is an artifact of how GitHub was originally designed. To my recollection, all timestamps in the database are normalized to Pacific time. So yes, this is the expected behavior.

[mister-y]

Thanks for the reply. Just to confirm, it’s not just that they’re being set back to a certain timezone - it’s that they’re being set back to a particular time in that timezone. So it doesn’t matter if you you try to set the time to 1:00 PM, 5:00 PM or 8:00 PM - it gets set back to 7:00 AM or 8:00 AM regardless. Is that expected too?

[lee-dohm]

Yes, because midnight Pacific time is 7AM or 8AM UTC time depending on whether Pacific time is in daylight savings or not on that date.