Timestamps

Hi All,

I've recently added the preliminary code to support timestamping in bfs, but
it's left me wondering what's the best way to track time under VSTa. My own
leanings would be to timestamp everything in GMT (UTC) and then have some
notion of localtime - but maybe I'm a little biased living on GMT 6 months
of the year :-) I certainly don't want to have to implement something
as comprehensive as NTP but it would be nice to have a reference.

Whatever, I guess there needs to be some agreement on how filesystems, etc,
will report timestamps. I'd really like to be able to cover the 1980's (I
have quite a lot of data files from the late 80's), but at the momemnt VSTa
time seems to start on 01JAN1990.

>From some quick calculations I think 32 bits gives us 136 years of coverage
at 1 second accuracy. I just checked RFC 1305 (NTP version 3) and this
seems to be the way it's done there (NTP uses these as the most significant
32 bits out of 64 - the other 32 provide subsecond accuracy to about 200
ps).

Is there any reason why the filesystems, etc, shouldn't do something similar
and nominally start time at 01JAN1900 - I'm quite sure that by the time 2036
comes around no-one will be too worried about extending 32 bits of timestamp
:-) I'd hope that this might make things simpler for a few reasons:

        - If someone does want to add more accurrate time synchronisation
          we'd already be pretty close (eg if someone wants to add leap
          seconds).

        - In a distributed system it would be very useful (perhaps
          essential?) to have very accurate timestamping of messages

        - Having one format means it's possible to use a single set of
          library functions for all conversions.

Can anyone think of reasons or other standards that might suggest a
different/better approach?

                Regards,
                Dave
Received on Sat Apr 9 18:03:37 1994