[Mono-dev] making mono builds reproducible (xamarin bz #26842)

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

On Mon 2015-02-16 18:17:53 -0500, Michael McGlothlin wrote:
> I'd always store time in epochs. Seconds since 1/1/1970 GMT.
>
> The use of textual date strings instead of a epochs is one of the
> worst things I've seen from the C# way of doing things. I had often
> wondered why so many programs could have so much trouble with handling
> dates and times correctly..

I agree that silly standards like RFC 822 timestamps are crazy and
should not be used anywhere we can avoid them.

However, the ISO-8601 date/timestamp format is both human- and
machine-parseable, whereas most humans can't look at a UNIX epoch
timestamp and know even whether it's in the past or the future.

That said, i really care more about reproducibility than i do about any
particular timestamp format.  if folks are fine with UNIX epoch
timestamps and with the environment variable interfacfe Jo proposes,
i'll be happy with that.  Is this something that could be adopted
upstream?

        --dkg