Re: [coreutils] Re: [PATCH 2/2] stat: print timestamps to full resolution

[Eric Blake]

On 10/21/2010 03:22 AM, Andreas Schwab wrote:
> Jim Meyering<address@hidden>  writes:
>
> > And besides, with coreutils-8.6 already released, reverting the
> > change is no longer an option.
>
> Why?  I'm pretty sure more breakage will pop up over time.

How would you propose 'fixing' it? By burning three more % specifiers, 
which are already coming close to a scarce resource?  (Note that %W is 
completely new with coreutils 8.6, so no one has ever had a short %W to 
deal with, so it is just %[XYZ]).  And why give the user less 
information than what is available?  %X was first implemented prior to 
POSIX 2008, back when subsecond resolution was not mandatory; but now 
that POSIX requires nanosecond information (even if the file system 
itself has less granularity), I see no reason to hide that fact, even if 
a few scripts need to be adjusted to be more robust to potential 
nanosecond information.

--
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org