Make it easier to get the local Date

[dalewking]

As we have found out the hard way getting the current local Date with Klock is kind of verbose and if you are not careful you can get the date in UTC which can differ from local Date for part of the day.

One might think that DateTime.now().date would be correct but that is the date in UTC. If you are familiar with DateTime vs. DateTimeTz one might think that you should do DateTime.nowLocal().date or DateTimeTz.now().date but those don't compile because for no discernible reason DateTimeTz does not have a date property like DateTime does. So one starting point is just add that. Without it it requires sticking a .local in there to convert to a DateTime to be able to get the Date

In our project I added some extension properties to get the local date, but it would be nice if Klock did something similar:

val DateTimeTz.date get() = local.date
val Date.Companion.today get() = DateTime.nowLocal().date

[Voto]

I support the point from @dalewking. We also were thinking that DateTime.now() returns a localised date. UTC is the worst return value. Who apart from Britain needs UTC? ;-)
Thx Alex

[soywiz]

We all need UTC :) specially when you want to compare dates with different timezones and don't want to have daylight saving issues.

I'm tagging this, as a good first issue ;)

[dalewking]

I also have trouble going the other way from a date to a DateTime. I have battled unit test issues for months (and just fixed espresso tests yesterday) where tests will fail at night when local time (Eastern) has a different Date from UTC

[soywiz]

From my experience, since timezone offset rules change over the time even for the same longitude, you usually want to store it UTC and usually the local offset when relevant.
In the end we all have different pains, and the pains are usually what moves us to make and suggest changes. My focus right now is at other place so I'm not going to make the PR myself. But I will be happy to discuss this in a PR from someone else with actual proposed changes and tests showing the point and its usage via code.