On Fri, Nov 30, 2001 at 08:47:11AM -0500, Benjamin Coates wrote:
> >From Oskar Sandberg <oskar at freenetproject.org>
<> 
> Cvs uses getdate, public domain code that parses dates in pretty much any 
> format you would want (like "August 12" or "5 weeks ago" or "yesterday"...) 
> into a time number, we could use that to make it extremely easy to specify 
> which DBR you want.  I'll volunteer to port that to java if it hasn't been 
> done already. (I can't find one)
> 
> Sound good?

java.text.DateFormat already exists, that is not the issue (not that
these programs can be perfect - what day is 01-04-03?)

However, it has to be noted that using things like "August 12" or "5
weeks ago" is hardly going to be sufficient to look up the data. I mean,
without knowing what the baseline is, that cannot be translated into a
page address.

This brings me to another suggestion - maybe we should leave the actual
URIs to the DBR pages the way they are, and instead add format for
specifying the date the client should use when interpreting a DBR. So
say that 

SSK at aaaaaaaaaaa,bbbbbbbbb/mag

is a DBR, then that requesting that key retrieves the DBR, calculates
the key which the current time falls within, and redirects to that
version which could be

SSK at aaaaaaaaaaa,bbbbbbbbb/3c07a530-mag

but, if I instead requested

SSK at aaaaaaaaaaa,bbbbbbbbb/mag[5 days ago]

then it would first ignore the parts inside [] and request the same DBR
as before, but when interpreting the DBR data, it would use the time of
five days ago rather than the current time. That way it wouldn't matter
what weird baseline or wacky update schedule the person used, because it
would calculate the key for 5 days ago the same way it would have
calculated the key. 

Wouldn't this make everybody happy?


<>
-- 

Oskar Sandberg
oskar at freenetproject.org

_______________________________________________
Devl mailing list
Devl at freenetproject.org
http://lists.freenetproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devl

Reply via email to