Gregorian vs. Unix timestamps [JIRA: RIAK-2346]

[lucasbru]

This might be a non-issue, but I realized that timestamps in vector clocks are defined as of year 0 instead of year 1970, leading to a 5-byte large integer encoding instead of the usual 4-byte encoding. Is that worth the potential performance hit?

[jonmeredith]

The reasons are mostly historical around the calendar module. There's no real need for anything beyond the time the vclock is first created in a cluster.

It's something we'd like to get around to re-engineering, but for Riak we need to worry about compatibility and changing to a more recent epoch will make them smaller and confusing.