Subject: Re: Millisecond precision in timestamps?

From: Robin Rosenberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2012 00:37:01 +0100 (CET)

----- Ursprungligt meddelande -----
> On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 11:58 PM, Eric S. Raymond <[email-masked]>
> wrote:
> > Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>:
> >> Roundtrip conversions may benefit from sub-second timestamps, but
> >> personally I think negative timestamps are more interesting and of
> >> practical use.
> >
> > You mean, as in times before the Unix epoch 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z?
> >
> > Interesting.  I hadn't thought of that.  I've never seen a software
> > project under version control with bits that old, which is
> > significant
> > because I've probably done more digging into ancient software than
> > anybody other than a specialist historian or two.
> 
> One example I've heard is someone wanting to throw the history
> of a country's laws into git so they can diff them.

Not sure any laws were passed on Feb 30th 1712 in sweden, but perhaps
you can define new time zones to handle that, but I doubt it is practically
doable when you get to countries and regions with less precise boundaries.

Seconds-since as a representation for dates is a dangerous and very
messy game. Java gets it wrong somewhere in 1910 and my guess is others
get it wrong too. There is change in time zones which triggers the bug.

-- robin