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

[mark wilkinson]

Well... I'm only arguing for the sake of arguing now, because it's fun! :-) 

An epoch or a timestamp assumes than the machine is set to the correct time and zone!  Though a much rarer case, it isn't impossible... The *fact* is that we cannot trust the timestamp to be correct.

But it doesn't matter :-). Let me see how easy it is to extract the TZ from the OS or an environment variable.  If it is unreliable over the different OS's I'll just retrieve the epoch and use that as Martin suggests.  If I can reliably get the TZ information on all OS's, then I'll add it to the current timestamp.

M


-----Original Message-----
From: Martin Senger <senger at ebi.ac.uk>
Date: Sat, 28 Jan 2006 05:50:24 
To:Mark Wilkinson <markw at illuminae.com>
Cc:Core developer announcements <moby-dev at biomoby.org>
Subject: Re: [MOBY-dev] Versioning of LSID's + vote on RFC 1913 & 1914

> I still don't see how the "ms since epoch" option tells us the  
> time-zone...
>
    It does not. If we use "ms since epoch" we must document it and say
"this is ms since epoch in UTC". And in the perl code you will use
function 'time' and not 'localtime' (and you will multiply it by 1000
because perl gives you only seconds - unless you use Time:HiRes module).

> ...but I also don't see why it is *critical* to know this at all...  I  
>
   It is not critical. You are right that the critical is only to uniquely
identify a version. But as a side-effect we may use this version for
findng when an object was registered ( and display it nicely in various
clients). In order to do this properly, we need to know what time is used
in the version field.

> however what we are really trying to do here is generate a unique
> string, not record time...
>
   As said above, generating a unique string is important/critical, but if
we can in the same time to record time, why not to do it usefully.

   Cheers,
   Martin

-- 
Martin Senger
   email: martin.senger at gmail.com
   skype: martinsenger
consulting for:
   International Rice Research Institute
   Biometrics and Bioinformatics Unit
   DAPO BOX 7777, Metro Manila
   Philippines, phone: +63-2-580-5600 (ext.2324)

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--
Mark Wilkinson
...on the road!