Kind of puzzled about timestamps

[John Abreau]

On Sat, Mar 6, 2021 at 7:48 PM Ben Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 4, 2021 at 9:57 PM Joshua Judson Rosen
> <rozzin at hackerposse.com> wrote:
> > And as a general word of advice from someone whose been burnt way too
> many times:
> > if you're going to put timestamps in your filenames, either just use UTC
> > or explicitly indicate which timezone the timestamps are assuming.
>
> Even that's not enough, because the stupid humans keep changing what
> the time zones mean.  Say you find a file that has a stored time of
> 2007 MAR 31 17:00 UTC.  If that file was written before 2005, then the
> offset to US Eastern is 5 hours.  If that file was written after 2005,
> the offset is 4 hours.  Which did the human mean when they instructed
> the computer to write the file?  No way of knowing, in the general
> case.
>

I'd argue that this case does not matter, because the human is making a
reference to an event in the future, and it is impossible in principle to
anticipate unexpected future changes in such definitions.

You could plan a vacation in Switzerland in 2030, but if an asteroid
obliterates Switzerland in 2028, your vacation plans become null and void.
It's not a contingency you need to plan for when making your vacation
plans.


-- 
John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
Email jabr at blu.org / WWW http://www.abreau.net / PGP-Key-ID 0x920063C6
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