Re: [PATCH] Use time_t for timestamps returned by approxidate() instead of unsigned

From: Tim Henigan <tim.henigan@gmail.com>
Date: Jan 24, 2009, 16:13 UTC
Message-ID: <32c343770901240813k2eeb19b0q65b533f829cb44d4@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.1.00.0901240726070.13232@racer>

On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 1:27 AM, Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

>
> Hi,
>
> On Thu, 22 Jan 2009, Tim Henigan wrote:
>
> > Use time_t for timestamps returned by approxidate() instead of unsigned
> > long.  All references to approxidate were checked as well as references
> > to OPT_DATE.
>
> Hmm.  I vaguely remember Linus mentioning recently that unsigned long is
> the appropriate data type for the Unix Epoch...

You are correct. I just found a post on this list where Linus specifically rejected a similar patch from another contributor. A quote from https://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/git/2008/11/6/4014124:

    " "time_t" is one of those totally broken unix types. The
standards say that
    it's an "arithmetic" type, but leaves it open to be just about anything.
    Traditionally, it's a signed integer (bad), and in theory it could even be
    a floating point value, I think.

    And in _all_ such cases, it's actually better to cast it to "unsigned
    long" than keep time in a system-dependent format that is most likely
    either _already_ "unsigned long", or alternatively broken."

Should I update the GitWiki page to remove this Janitor task or do you keep it as a test to see if people are properly searching the mail archives?

Sorry to waste your time on the patch review.

Thanks, Tim