New submission from John S. Gruber <johnsgru...@gmail.com>:

This report is meant to prompt discussion, if desired, on the advisability of 
distinguishing new files from old using subsecond data. (It isn't clear to me 
that it is important to do this.)

Some file systems keep sub-second modification times, but the number of seconds 
since the epoch grows to a very large number, and given the limited number of 
significant bits in floating point numbers, it's important to carry out this 
comparison carefully (or use some new integer data) so newly created files 
don't appear to be older than their source files due to rounding and other 
conversion anomalies. Current floats don't have the precision to hold both the 
number of seconds since the epoch and a nanosecond precision fractional second.

----------
assignee: tarek
components: Distutils2
messages: 135090
nosy: alexis, eric.araujo, jsjgruber, tarek
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: Is it desired to distinguish new files from old with sub-second 
resolution?
type: feature request
versions: Python 2.7

_______________________________________
Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue11993>
_______________________________________
_______________________________________________
Python-bugs-list mailing list
Unsubscribe: 
http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com

Reply via email to