[Carpet] representation of date and time

[Thomas Radke]

Hi,

the flesh provides routines which return date/time information:

   Util_CurrentDate()
   Util_CurrentTime()
   CCTK_CompileDate()
   CCTK_CompileTime()

represented in the format "<Month> DD YYYY" for a date (where <Month> is 
a 3-letter literal) and "HH:MM:SS" for time (no timezone information is 
encoded).

I want to use these functions in the Announce interface, in order to tag 
each announced item by a given datetime. One can then, for instance, ask 
an information service which stores such announced Cactus data, to "list 
all my simulations on peyote from last week".
However, this requires that the datetime information is easily 
machine-processable, ie. follows a standard (in this case: ISO 8601). At 
least the date format above is not compatible with this standard.

I suggest two things:

  * Add 2 new flesh functions to be used by the Announce routines

            char* Util_CurrentDateTime(void);
      const char* Util_CompileDateTime(void);

    which return a datetime string following ISO 8601. The first function
    returns a pointer to an allocated string which must be freed
    afterwards.

  * Add a timezone indicator for strings returned by Util_CurrentTime()
    and CCTK_CompileTime(). This would look like "13:55:13+0200" for my
    current timezone.

Comments ?

-- 
Cheers, Thomas.