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From: | Bruce Korb |
Subject: | Re: parse_duration() |
Date: | Sun, 02 Nov 2008 14:16:01 -0800 |
User-agent: | Thunderbird 2.0.0.12 (X11/20071114) |
Bruno Haible wrote:
The little question remaining though is "how many seconds in a year" and, more importantly, "how many seconds in a month"? In other words, if some one in February were expecting P1M to represent a 28 day duration and a 31 day duration had it been March, um, well,Very good point. Maybe this means the functionality is better broken down into a parsing stage and a conversion stage which ultimately produces seconds. The state between these two would be a struct { year, months, weeks, days, ... }. Hmm?
I think that there lies madness. Is the duration that someone is trying to express necessarily starting from now? The primary intent was for stuff like: timeout --duration='xxxxxxxx' some-command which is, indeed, meaning "from now". So, if this were to somehow become widely used, it would be clearly incorrect to specify that some activity was to happen a certain duration after an event of some sort, and have "month" mean something different depending upon when that event happened to happen. That then raises the question of, "Why is anyone worrying over durations that so far exceed a day that using months is important?" For this context, the right, proper and easiest solution is to say that months are 30 days and leave it at that. Excruciating care just brings up issues that are simply not worth the bother to figure out. I did omit weeks in the last post. So, posting again -- this time for sure.... :) Cheers - Bruce
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