Signature timestamp ordering and dissecting

[Werner Koch]

On Wed, 18 Sep 2013 15:28, John at enigmail.net said:

> Times are stored as a number of seconds. Sorting numbers in order is a
> sensible thing

Let me add a this from doc/DETAILS:

 Note that the date is usally printed in seconds since epoch, however,
 we are migrating to an ISO 8601 format (e.g. "19660205T091500").  This
 is currently only relevant for X.509.  A simple way to detect the new
 format is to scan for the 'T'.  Note that old versions of gpg without
 using the =--fixed-list-mode= option used a "yyyy-mm-tt" format.

Thus if you want to parse a GnuPG time string, you should better check
whether a 'T' is in that string.  And you should also take care of the
year 2038 problem; which is the very reason that we use fixed size
strings in GPGSM to work with timestamps.  Those ISO time strings are
also easy to sort.


Shalom-Salam,

   Werner

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