Re: alternate time formats (ldapsearch in OL 2)

[Peter W <peterw@usa.net>]

On Fri, Aug 03, 2001 at 07:10:12PM +0200, Michael Ströder wrote:
> Peter W wrote:
> > 
> > On Fri, Aug 03, 2001 at 12:37:00PM +0200, Michael Ströder wrote:

> > > How do you store a date before 1970-01-01? Off course you can argue
> > > that *your* applications don't need to do that.
> > 
> > Negative values.

> >   The day before the epoc began is "Wed Dec 31 00:00:00 1969"
> 
> Sorry, but this has limitations. How many of us are already
> running OpenLDAP with signed 64-bit integers?

Sure, it has limitations. With 32-bit integers, the LDAP standard is more
flexible. And I suggested this as an option, so use the old way if you
prefer. But note that with 64-bit signed integers, you can register dates to
the birth of the universe & beyond. With YYYYMMDDhhmmssZ you can't even
register Year 1 in the Chinese calendar, can you? (I can't seem to find a
free copy of the official x.208 spec to see if there's any meand for
indicating time "BC".) A seconds-since-epoc system could also be defined as
a float value, allowing for more precision as well as broader range.

-Peter