From: Ben Giddings <bg-rubytalk@...>
Date: 2004-06-12T00:52:34+09:00
Subject: Re: The dangers of sleeping ...

Dale Martenson wrote:
> I don't see it as a corner case. The same way I don't see leap year as a
> corner case. Every Fall, most computers automatically adjust for daylight
> savings time. I would expect the software running on my systems to handle
> that case.

Right, but that's the local timezone, not the UTC clock.  Every decent 
OS (and I think these days that may even include Windows) internally 
uses UTC, and just displays a different time to the user.

gettimeofday() on Linux at least, returns the number of seconds and 
microseconds since January 1st 1970.  This is the value that should 
never suddenly change, and should never, under any circumstances, go 
backwards.

It seems pretty reasonable to me to expect this value to stay sane, but 
if you either know you're on a computer that will have this value 
changed by big amounts, or you have specialized needs, go right ahead 
and make a better system, and if you do, please share!

Ben