Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2002 09:28:53 +1000 From: Joshua Goodall <joshua@roughtrade.net> To: Garrett Wollman <wollman@lcs.mit.edu> Cc: Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@ofug.org>, cvs-committers@FreeBSD.org, cvs-all@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: cvs commit: src/usr.bin/units units.lib Message-ID: <20020710232853.GB26709@roughtrade.net> In-Reply-To: <200207102103.g6AL3s8Y046834@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> References: <200207100913.g6A9DgKX009215@freefall.freebsd.org> <xzpr8ibhmlb.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no> <20020710131548.D36004@uriah.heep.sax.de> <xzplm8jg1wc.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no> <200207102103.g6AL3s8Y046834@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu>
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On Wed, Jul 10, 2002 at 05:03:54PM -0400, Garrett Wollman wrote: > <<On 10 Jul 2002 15:15:15 +0200, Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@ofug.org> said: > > > all fine and dandy, except today's rate is 1.0115, and last Friday it > > was 1.03, and tomorrow's rate will be something else again, and next > > month it might be 0.95 or it might be 1.15, who knows? And you still > > insist this is meaningful? > > Most exchange rates do not change very rapidly over time. USD 1.50 has > been approximately equal to GBP 1 for a very long time. Similarly, > before Eurofication, there were almost a dozen European currencies all > approximately equal to each other and about USD 0.18. It seems horribly bogus to include "approximate" exchange rates on the grounds that they're within someone's arbitrarily chosen margin of error. This data is basically useless the day after commit. Do you feel like pasting a huge disclaimer over financial data that is known to be incorrect? Some major financial information sources already do that with data that is supposedly real-time and accurate. A nice way to do this is with DNS, the way whois(1) does, with 'A' records containing a current value ... but oh so spoofable, and who feels like running such a service just for that, anyway? > (It would be > nice, if we're going to have currencies in units.lib, if it would > accept standard ISO 4617 symbols.) If the tables were updated yearly, > that's probably good enough for most uses. I can't think of a single currency exchange lookup that a sensible person would trust if it was more than 24 hours out of date. Joshua To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe cvs-all" in the body of the message
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