bug#71572: [PATCH] seconds-to-string-approximate

[Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>]

On 7/4/24 06:29, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> Basically, this shows that:
> 
>   . mastodon truncates where seconds-to-string rounds

For high precision timestamps it's often better to truncate, for various 
reasons. That's what the C code does with timestamps, anyway. 
seconds-to-string historically has rounded several times which of course 
is not best but apparently is good enough for its intended application area.


>   . seconds-to-string lacks the "1 hour 11 min" output format

That format could be confusing with negative delays, e.g., "-1 hour 11 min".

>   . seconds-to-string sometimes produces inaccurate results, as in
>     5.5 => 5.48s

No, it's the other way round: seconds-to-string is more accurate than 
the alternatives. That's merely a misfeature in the test script. 
seconds-to-string is passed the argument 5.475149999999998, and formats 
it as "5.48" whereas the test script formats it as "5.5".


I'm not sold on the "half" argument; seems like a cuteness rather than a 
feature that's all that useful (among other things, it assumes Unicode 
or something like it). What's really going on here is that there's an 
optional argument specifying style and I imagine that style preferences 
will differ (Mastodon style, etc.).

I imagine that style preferences could proliferate. Is there an ISO or 
similar standard for this sort of thing?