gmdate() vs. date()

While making a post today, I noticed that the timestamp was one hour behind. Obviously, it did not get updated when daylight savings time took effect here in the Central Time Zone (Texas).

After reading forum posts, it seems that I am expected to manually change the time offset in the WP Options each time daylight savings comes around. Either that, or install a plugin. This bit of advice does not work.

My server’s local time is correct, as is the output from PHP’s date() function (<? echo date("h:i:s A T"); ?>), but WP is using gmdate(). Why is this?

It would seem logical to me to either use the local time with date(), and have the offset based on that, or else give us the option of a GMT offset or a local offset.

I don’t relish the idea of remembering to change all my clocks, plus my WP installs…