On Wed, Feb 21, 2018 at 06:58:34PM -0500, Randall S. Becker wrote:
> May I suggest storing the date/time in UTC+0 in all cases. I can see
> potential issues a couple of times a year where holes exist. I cannot even
> fathom what would happen on a merge or edit of history.
I consider storing the timestamp simply in the traditional
seconds-since-epoch UNIX timestamp format. But I'm not entirely sure
yet (see below).
If a timestamp includes the offset, there shouldn't be any issue with
holes. UTC+0 is nice, too, of course, though some might want to
preserve the timezone in which the timestamp was actually created.
The bigger issue is usually to copy with those pesky leap seconds. It
makes a difference whether one uses solar seconds ("posix" style; those
are more commonly seen) or atomic seconds ("right" style) for the UNIX
timestamp. Those differences accumulate over time, so you can have
almost half a minute delta if you are not careful with timestamp
conversion. If I remember correctly, rcs uses some rather awkward
interative convergence algorithm to portably convert from
human-readable date and time to UNIX timestamps.
Thus I'm still not sure whether it will be a UNIX-format timestamp or
whether a human-readable date/time might be preferrable.
Best wishes
Peter
--
Peter Backes, rtc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
