[Koha] Handling of TimeZones and different Calendars (Thailand Buddhist Calendar) on a single shared Koha server

[Chris Cormack]

On 3 January 2017 at 20:54, Jonathan Druart
<jonathan.druart at bugs.koha-community.org> wrote:
> Hello Alex,
>
> On Tue, 3 Jan 2017 at 05:09 Alex Shepherd <kiwi64ajs at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi Guys,
>>
>> I’m hoping to host several independent libraries on a single VM.
>>
>> The libraries are all in Asia spread across Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Bangkok
>> and the server is a VM hosted on Digital Ocean in Singapore.
>>
>> The library in Bangkok have used the Buddhist calendar for some (not all)
>> of their dates like DoB and some other date fields in the Bibliographic and
>> other records.
>>
>> This is causing an issue with the date calculations for patron age and no
>> doubt it will cause other issues.
>>
>> So this raises several issues for me:
>>
>> 1) Is there a tidy or supported way for me to handle the Buddhist dates?
>>
>
> Nope, I would recommend you to write a script to adjust the dates directly
> in the database using sql queries.
>
>
>> 2) Does Koha have any way to define a timezone and locale on a library by
>> library basis where there are multiple libraries on the one server?
>>
>
> Unfortunately Koha uses the timezone of the system. So AFAIK you won't
> manage to handle several libraries with different timezones on the same
> server.
> I agree that this is a big restriction Koha. We greatly improved our dates
> related code, but we could do much more.
>
>
It also gets very messy with cron, and log rotation and lots of things
nothing to do with Koha.
For example you don't want your log rotates running in the middle of
the day in one of you libraries. So there is only so much we could do
in Koha, if you have libraries in different timezones, different
servers are the only safe way to go.

Chris