Re: [RFC 11/32] xfs: convert to struct inode_time

["H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>]

On 06/02/2014 08:31 AM, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> 
> I wonder if it would make sense to try to promulgate via the Austin
> group, and possibly the C standards committee the concept of a bit
> pattern (that might commonly be INT_MAX or UINT_MAX) that means "time
> unknown", or "time indefinite" or "we couldn't encode the time".
> 

(time_t)-1 already has this meaning for some calls (e.g. time(2)).
However, this also means Wed Dec 31 23:59:59 UTC 1969, and unfortunately
something similar applies to all possible bit patterns, certainly within
the range of an int.

> We would then teach gmtime(3) and asctime(3) to print some appropriate
> message, and we could teach programs like find (with the -mtime)
> option, make, tmpwatch, et. al., that they can't make any presumption
> about the comparibility of any timestamp which has a value of
> TIME_UNDEFINIED.
> 
> It would be problematic for time(2) or gettimeofday(2) to return
> TIME_UNDEFINED, since there are programs that care about time ticking
> forward, but I could imagine a new interface which would be permitted
> to return a flag indicating that we don't know the current time
> (because the CMOS battery had run down, etc.) so instead we're going
> to be counting the number of seconds since the system was booted.

This assumes that we actually know that that is the case, which may be
an aggressive assumption.

	-hpa