Re: Configuring for 64-bit integer date/time storage?

Thomas Lockhart writes:

> I've got patches to enable storage of date/time values as integers
> rather than as floating point numbers, as discussed earlier.

I'd like to know first what the overall plan for this feature is. If it
is to make the date/time values "better" all around, i.e., you get exact
arithmetic and comparable range and precision, and the same or better
speed, then I'd vote for making it the default and offering the old
implementation as a (silent?) fallback. If, on the other hand, it is a
space vs. time vs. whatever tradeoff then we'd really need to see the
numbers first to decide where to go with it.

The other day I offered the "rules of the game" for configure options, one
of which was that an option should not replace one behavior by another,
so that binary packagers can make neutral decisions about which options to
build with. The last thing we'd want to happen is that every operating
system distribution comes with a different timestamp implementation. That
would be quite a chaos.

--
Peter Eisentraut peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net