Proposal: Use time rather than old-time in directory

[Jon Fairbairn]

Ian Lynagh <igloo at earth.li> writes:
> This proposal is to change directory to use the time package rather than
> the old-time package. This will hopefully be a significant step towards
> actually making the transition in general.

+1

The present state of affairs annoys me every time I want to deal
with file modification times.

> I'm not sure if POSIXTime or UTCTime is the better type to use. Does
> anyone know?

I think the library definition ought not to rely on
platform-specific time representations¹. Apropos the question of
avoiding information loss, can the library have implementation
specific work-arounds? Something like on POSIX systems, have
UTCTime have an extra (secret) field that provides sufficient
information to turn it back to the system representation.

[1] and I’m saying this from the point of view of someone who
uses unix-type systems almost exclusively.

-- 
Jón Fairbairn                                 Jon.Fairbairn at cl.cam.ac.uk
http://www.chaos.org.uk/~jf/Stuff-I-dont-want.html  (updated 2010-09-14)