[LEAPSECS] A new use for Pre-1972 UTC

Rob Seaman seaman at noao.edu
Tue Feb 17 15:47:45 EST 2009


The URL to the OASIS document didn't work for me, so it's hard to
evaluate the reasoning behind the choice of format here. What exactly
is the use case they are trying to satisfy? That said, I'm with
Tony. This seems like what ISO 8601 was designed for. If not ISO
8601, how about Julian day number to 5 or 6 decimal places? Why do
they need a count of elapsed seconds? Requirements are good.
Challenging them aggressively is better.

Rob
---

On Feb 17, 2009, at 1:39 PM, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:


> In message <20090217.133212.-828392962.imp at bsdimp.com>, "M. Warner

> Losh" writes

> :

>> In message: <F21E028C02794C7BB61111CBA28E2EB6 at grendel>

>> "Gerard Ashton" <ashtongj at comcast.net> writes:

>> : Concatenate the "epoch" time at the time this ID value is being

>> : generated ; the "epoch" time is the number of seconds elapsed

>> since

>> : 00:00:00 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) January 01,

>>

>> I think it would be better to define this in a different way. It

>> should be defined more like:

>>

>> ((year - 1970) * 365 + ((year - 1969) / 4) + day_of_year) *

>> 86400 +

>> hour * 3600 + min * 60 + sec

>

> It would have been even better to write:

>

> An ISO C "time_t" timestamp.

>

> Poul-Henning




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