Imagine what happens if your servers' sysop one day decides he'd switch his servers to use UTC as their RTC'S timezone. These modules will return the correct date, simply adding the n hours offset will fail in such a case...

Times are just data. Operate on it. If you want to know what time it is in Zimbabwe, you'd calculate the difference to your local time

So, what is it? Can you, or can't you calculate the difference? First you say you can't, then you say you can.

Also, how would Date::Manip or Date::Calc continue to return "the correct date" when the server switches timezones (wrongly apparently, otherwise localtime() would return the correct time).

Abigail