Proposal: Use time rather than old-time in directory

Michael Snoyman michael at snoyman.com
Mon Oct 24 09:14:41 CEST 2011


On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 12:30 PM, Herbert Valerio Riedel <hvr at gnu.org> wrote:
> On Sun, 2011-10-23 at 06:11 +0200, Michael Snoyman wrote:
>> and I think UTCTime is the right data type.
>
> Btw, why do You think UTCTime is more appropriate than POSIXTime?
>
> Don't the underlying system calls ({,f,l}stat(2)) actually return
> `time_t` values for the `st_{a,m,c}time` fields which are supposed to
> mean "seconds since the Epoch"?

I'm talking from a library user perspective. I don't think I've once
used POSIXTime, whereas I use UTCTime regularly. Having to deal with
just the one type would be very convenient.

I think your implication is that it will be more efficient to retrieve
these values as POSIXTime. If that's the case, maybe it makes sense to
provide two sets of functions. But I definitely would find it an
inconvenience to have to deal with POSIXTime myself.

Michael



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