On Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:49:17 -0800 Zac Medico wrote: > > Not non-preservation. Partial and inconsistent corruption. > > Wouldn't "loss of precision" be a more accurate description? Of the > known packages which require timestamp preservation, do any of them > use sub-second precision in their timestamp comparisons? No. When you're dealing with decimals, floating point rounding isn't a simple truncation: >>> 1234567890.999999999 1234567891.0 nor is it a rounding: >>> 1234567890.111111111 1234567890.1111112 The former is particularly bad, since POSIX deals with legacy functions by ignoring the nanosecond part, not by rounding it. -- Ciaran McCreesh