[Python-Dev] float atime/mtime/ctime - a bad idea? (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido@python.org
Wed, 16 Oct 2002 10:20:57 -0400

> In this particular case, I think having a global flag should be good > enough. We can easily rig the standard library not to depend on its > value.

Sounds good. Unless I hear otherwise, I'll add statfloattimes(bool). That still leaves the question of a migration plan, assuming that users, in general, would appreciate to silently get subsecond timestamps where possible. Here is a proposal: - 2.3: just add statfloattimes. In the documentation, warn that the value will change in the future. - 2.4: make statfloattimes(True) the default. Applications that break would need to add statfloattimes(False) in a central place. This has no phase were a warning is emitted, but any scheme that adds a warning means that the user first has to add something (to silence the warning), and then to remove something (when the default changes - although the option might stay forever).

Sounds good.

I wonder if we could let the tuple-ish interface return ints forever (or until it's no longer supported).

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)