Site synchronization and daylight savings/standard time

Question

The familiar problem of Dreamweaver not accounting for the
change from Daylight Savings to Standard time persists with CS3.
This only shows up on Windows machines. Windows (tested with both
XP and Vista) maintains all file times in UTC, and changes the
locally displayed time based on the time zone. The remote servers
are all Linux boxes running Apache. DW connection is through SFTP.
Dreamweaver appears unable to figure out the local time stamp
offset imposed by Windows. After changing from Daylight Savings to
Standard time, Check In operations produce a message that all
remote files are dated an hour later than the local files. This is
the opposite behavior one sees in the Spring, when the change from
Standard to DST has Dreamweaver believing all remote files are an
hour out of date.
In the past I have manually changed the file modification
times on all files for every site. Given that this comes to several
hundred thousand individual files, it is a pain. Searching yet
again for a method to convince Dreamweaver to correctly interpret
the file timestamps produced little more than Google's listing
thousands of search hits for other folks mentioning the same
problem.
It made no difference which timezone the server was in (or
set to) relative to the PC running Dreamweaver. The timezones could
be identical or different -- DW always complained the remote files
were an hour later than the local ones. I changed timezones on both
the server and the local machine. No help. Neither was rebuilding
the site cache nor manually deleting the WinFileCache*.dat file. I
also tried manually editing a dwsync.xml file in a _notes folder to
see if I could alter DW's view of the world. Again, no such luck.
Making matters far worse, however, Dreamweaver complains
about file time differences in newly modified files as well. A
standard Synchronize command produces "Resolve" errors for every
newly modified file that is not first checked out from the remote
site using DW, saying both local and remote versions have changed
since the last sync. Running "Check In" on a newly modified file
that was not explicitly checked out (e.g. an image or other binary
file) does nothing, as DW sees a timestamp discrepancy. These files
must first be Put to the site, with the corresponding DW error
dialog, and then be checked in.
I am suspecting the problem stems from Dreamweaver's lack of
support for the
MDTM
command. Many other products, ranging from commercial packages
such as WS_FTP and Microsoft's Expression Web, to $30 shareware
programs such as Beyond Compare, to freeware programs including
WinSCP all correctly interpret Windows timestamps as well as
preserving the correct time upon file uploads. Is there any
solution other than changing the timestamps by an hour on every
file or getting every file from all sites to satisfy Dreamweaver's
belief that the files are all an hour newer than they actually are?
The former is a non-trivial task given the sheer number of files to
change; the latter is a bandwidth PITA for ~90GB of data.
Message to Adobe: Please fix this problem. It hits users
connecting Windows local machines to Linux servers twice a year.
Your competitors as well as shareware authors have sorted this
matter out.

Answer 1

Ethan H wrote:
> The familiar problem of Dreamweaver not accounting for
the change from Daylight
> Savings to Standard time persists with CS3.
Yes, it's a bug, and it's a PITA.
> Message to Adobe: Please fix this problem.
Message to Ethan H: This is a user-to-user forum. To get the
message to
the right people in Adobe, submit a bug report:
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform
Yes, I'm sure that Adobe knows about the problem without you
going to
the effort to submit a report, but the bug report/feature
request form
is how the development team assesses its priorities.
David Powers, Adobe Community Expert
Author, "The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3" (friends of
ED)
Author, "PHP Solutions" (friends of ED)
http://foundationphp.com/