[OSM-dev] OSM Date Formats

Brett Henderson brett at bretth.com
Sun Sep 30 05:47:57 BST 2007


Jon Burgess wrote:
> On Sat, 2007-09-29 at 12:16 +0200, Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:
>   
>> On 9/29/07, Brett Henderson <brett at bretth.com> wrote:
>>     
>>> I'd like to standardise on a common format.
>>>       
>> I'd like to standardise on just storing the number of seconds since
>> epoch (i.e. standard unix time). Faster to print, faster to parse and
>> well supported everywhere. Perhaps with a leading plus to make it
>> distinguishable.
>>
>> But hey, who cares what I think :)
>>
>> Have a nice day,
>>     
>
> It would make it trivial for lots of software to parse but practically
> impossible for a human. I imagine this would upset people that
> occasionally examine history result from the API or other generated
> osm.xml files.
>
> 	Jon
>   
I'm a little hesitant to do that as well.  My binary arithmetic is 
pretty ordinary at the best of times, and I do often find myself 
checking dates in planets to figure out various problems.  Another 
problem is that it will require synchronously updating a lot of tools to 
use the new format.

If we had a binary planet format then unix time might be appropriate.





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