Date: 29 Aug 1999 23:18:53 -0000 From: "D. J. Bernstein" <djb@cr.yp.to> Old timestamps have a defined relationship to civil time; old tick counters do not. Most time functions simply don't make sense for tick counters. These are good arguments that the current draft API is too complex. However, I'm not yet convinced that we should throw out TIME_MONOTONIC entirely, given its utility for important classes of applications. I already gave the example of the ``make'' program; if you use tick counters here instead of timestamps, you get disastrous results after a reboot. `make' is stuck between a rock and a hard place. There is no perfect solution based solely on time stamps of real-world hosts where clocks are supposed to be accurate, but sometimes aren't. Obviously TIME_MONOTONIC wouldn't solve make's problem. But it would solve the (different) problem of real-time measurements in the presence of real-world clock adjustments better than a pure UTC or TAI based approach would.