Re: PATCH: simplify printing of time stamps

[Urs Thuermann]

James Youngman <address@hidden> writes:

> I like the idea, and the added support for field widths could be useful.
> 
> 
> > I would also suggest reverting the change in findutils-4.3.3 that %TT
> > and %TS print nanosecond resolution.  This change makes it difficult
> > to only print the seconds in the minute without nanoseconds.  With
> > this patch the user could then achieve the same effect using %TT.%TN
> > or %TS.%TN, respecitvely.
> 
> Perhaps this would have been a better way to do things in the first
> place, but I'm a bit reluctant to simply revert the change in case
> someone is relying on it (since this approach also gives no transition
> path).

Since there weren't apparently any objections to change the behavior
when 4.3.3 was released I wonder why there's now reluctance to revert
the change.  The forward change did not even include a way to get the
old output, e.g. there was no way to print the seconds in the minute
without nanoseconds.  My patch provides both possibilities using
either %TS or %TS.%TN.

> Do you have any suggestions for how we should proceed in making this
> change?

One could add an environment variable to control whether the behavior
of findutils-4.3.3 or the older/newer behavior is desired.  This would
be very easy since we would only need to set different nstrftime()
format strings for %TT and %TS.

BTW, in the meantime I have made the patch against the git repository
which has changed considerably since the last release.

urs