time_t

[Charles Day]

On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 9:47 AM, Derek Atkins <warlord at mit.edu> wrote:

> Mike or Penny Novack <stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com> writes:
>
> > I would pay close attention to what Graham says here.
> >
> >> I didn't say that *all* timestamps were unnecessary, what I said was
> >> that dates that are actually dates, and not times, are being stored
> >> as times, and that this is incorrect.
> >>
> >> For an example, look at the date entered in a transaction. The UI
> >> only allows you to choose a year, a month and a day, and because of
> >> this, you should only store a year, a month and a day.
> >>
> > It is actually the case that (depending on financial policies) storing
> > the actual time could present problems.
> >
> > For example -- the rule might be "process all credits for the given
> > date before any debits for that date" --- or vice versa. If the
> > programmer mistakenly used time stamps rather than dates, the sort
> > would not give the expected results.
>
> These rules can certainly vary from place to place, locale to locale,
> or even person to person.   Why force the issue?  IF we let users
> set the TimeOfDay (see bug #89439) then users could easily set the
> intra-day ordering of transactions themselves.  If GnuCash ONLY
> stored a date then there would be NO WAY to set this.  So I think
> storing a timestamp really is more flexible.
>
> Having said that, I'll reiterate that I do still think there is a bug
> here.  I think that by DEFAULT GnuCash should store time stamps as
> 1200 UTC on the day in question instead of what appears to ME to be
> 0000 Local.  Using 1200UTC would give a proper DAY computation in any
> timezone even when converted to localtime (except perhaps if there
> were a UTC+12 or UTC-12 timezone, at which point there's possibly a
> fencepost issue).  However I dont believe there is anyone who lives
> *ON* the international date line.
>

I agree, 1200UTC would prevent time zones from shifting transactions to
another day. That would be a better default than 0000 local. That could work
for default price times as well (see but 541970).

P.S. I remember being in Tonga; the date line goes right through their
country. There is an "International Date Line" hotel with the line running
right through the building (or so they tell the tourists).


> > Michael
>
> -derek
>
> --
>       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
>       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
>       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
>       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available
>

-Charles