#4076 ago (ActiveSupport::CoreExtensions::Numeric::Time) does not respect current timezone - Ruby on Rails

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#4076 ✓wontfix

ago (ActiveSupport::CoreExtensions::Numeric::Time) does not respect current timezone

Reported by Reinier de Lange | March 1st, 2010 @ 09:25 AM

When calling 'ago' without parameters (so: ago(time = ::Time.now)), it returns an unexpected result as the timezone is disregarded. For example, see the following session:

  Loading production environment (Rails 2.3.4)
  >> Time.now
  => Mon Mar 01 00:12:04 +0100 2010
  >> Date.today
  => Mon, 01 Mar 2010
  >> 1.month.ago(Date.today)
  => Mon, 01 Feb 2010
  >> 1.month.ago(Time.now)
  => Mon Feb 01 00:12:51 +0100 2010
  >> 1.month.ago
  => Thu, 28 Jan 2010 23:12:57 UTC +00:00

I find it very confusing that 1.month.ago is not the same as 1.month.ago(Time.now). It is not clear to me whether this is a feature or a bug, but imo it should be changed.

Comments and changes to this ticket

José Valim March 3rd, 2010 @ 08:50 AM
Please provide a patch.
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Roel van der Hoorn March 3rd, 2010 @ 09:59 AM
- Tag set to “2.3.6”
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Simon Garcia April 10th, 2010 @ 08:45 AM
It's not a bug. Time conversions use ActiveSupport::Duration which relies on Time.current which returns Time.zone.now or Time.now depending if Time.zone_default is defined which can be done on environment.rb
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Nathaniel Bibler April 11th, 2010 @ 04:08 AM
I agree with the author that this is unexpected and not a well known task that must be performed (setting Time.zone_default), but Simon's suggestion does fix the issue and makes sense to me.
Prem Sichanugrist (sikachu) September 10th, 2010 @ 03:58 PM
- Assigned user set to “Prem Sichanugrist (sikachu)”
- Importance changed from “” to “Low”
Prem Sichanugrist (sikachu) September 10th, 2010 @ 04:33 PM
- State changed from “new” to “wontfix”
I was so tempted to write a patch for this one. However, it seems like it was changed from Time.now to Time.current in this commit:

http://github.com/rails/rails/commit/32b82e4c

So, I'd say that I'll leave it as-is. In order for ago to return the correct time zone, you must set the corresponding config.time_zone in application.rb (or environment.rb in Rails 2.3)