[MOBY-dev] Versioning of LSID's + vote on RFC 1913 & 1914

[Mark Wilkinson]

I still don't see how the "ms since epoch" option tells us the  
time-zone... is there a formal way to express this in that string?

...but I also don't see why it is *critical* to know this at all...  I  
guess, formally, if we are going to record time, then we should record it  
as accurately as possible; however what we are really trying to do here is  
generate a unique string, not record time...

M



On Fri, 27 Jan 2006 20:03:46 -0800, Martin Senger <senger at ebi.ac.uk> wrote:

>> A question for Martin - does the "milliseconds since epoch" number tell  
>> us
>> which time zone the milliseconds were measured in?
>>
>    No, it does not.
>
>> If not, then the discussion is somewhat moot...
>>
>    As I said at the beginning, any of these two ways needs to know which
> time zone is used. The string has advantage that you do not need to parse
> it (if you want to find its meaning - see further comment on it below),
> the formatted date has advantage that you see at once - without looking
> into a separate documentation - what time zone it was created in (because
> it should always use the 'Z' separator).
>
>> value, then maybe we gain something, maybe not (but we shouldn't be  
>> coding
>> as if it did either way, since we're not supposed to interpret LSID  
>> fields)
>>
>    I think that we do not need to be that rigid. If we document what our
> LSIDs contain, we can still interpret it. LSIDs are here for us, not vice
> versa :-). The LSID spec says: "The users of the LSIDs are permitted to
> use individual components (as specified elsewhere in this document) of
> LSIDs - although the LSID component parts themselves should be treated as
> opaque pieces of the identifier." So we are permitted to use version,
> eventhough we are not supposed to interpret it - but as I said rigidness
> is not an issue here.
>
>    Cheers,
>    Martin
>