Is there any roadmap within HDF5 to implement / define a portable time type? 
H5T_TIME is clearly not portable, and from python forum reports I see that 
python, at least, regards HDF5 as lacking a basic time type.
Alternatively, is there a wide-spread "de facto" that most people are using to 
represent time - e.g. double?

To be clear, I'm referring to a no-frills "seconds since start of epoch" type 
of time with resolution down to (at least) microseconds, which would be used 
for "timestamping" data. Given the user base that HDF5 supports, this problem 
must have come up many times, with more demanding sub-second resolution.

Currently, we use a composite, but this means that the time field always has to 
be treated in a "special" way, which is unsatisfactory. And at the most trivial 
level, HDFView allows a quick sanity check of data by plotting one column 
against another as abscissa .... except in the case of our composite time, 
where I'm limited to plotting against the seconds part of the structure.


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