Pádraig Brady wrote: ... >> That's simply an issue of whether the value is considered to be signed >> or unsigned, and can be fixed by the patch at the end of this message. >> >> However, let me take a step back a minute. Do users really want all >> this functionality? Personally, what I'd like to see is a single >> format like this: >> >> %.3X >> >> that prints out the entire seconds since the Epoch, truncated >> to millseconds. That's simpler than what we require now: >> >> %X.%.3:X >> >> The changelogs suggest that we used to do things the simpler way, >> but changed on Oct. 21. I don't recall this being discussed: I >> assume it was due to floating point rounding issues. Still, I'd >> prefer the simpler notation, and we should be able to implement it >> without floating point. Would that be OK? The idea would be >> to support ".PRECISION" in the formats for W, X, Y, and Z, and >> to drop support for ':W' and the like. > > I think you're echoing my suggestion here: > http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnu.coreutils.general/369
Oh! Indeed. Sorry I didn't see that part of the thread. > Given the counter arguments there it was decided to > split to X and :X etc. > > I still slightly prefer just using %.X as > it's backwards compat with older coreutils (excluding 8.6). So do I.
