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by zambal 1091 days ago
I'm not OP, but I can at least give an argument against using a timestamp for sorting versions: for various reasons system time is not guaranteed to be monotonic, which can result in cases where newer versions would be sorted before older versions.

See https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/erts/time_correction.html#in... for more info. It's about time handling in the Erlang run-time system, but the issue it describes is universal.

And having an Erlang background, I would say timestamps are also tricky in the context of distributed systems.

1 comments

This is great, thank you. I’d never considered using time stamps like this before which is why I was curious, but I suppose now I can continue not using them slightly more confidently. What is programming really, but figuring out what not to do.