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Human Era (HE) is a year numbering that adds 10 000 to current AD year numbering (today is year HE 12 017). Human Era is cool because HE 0 corresponds to human’s first settlements, and HE better represents humanity achievement as a whole. More information here
Even though there is no change that Human Era become our main year numbering, what is the best way to configure a linux system to Human Era?
jorispilot
Posted 2017-10-20T15:55:56.993
Reputation: 149
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I don't think there's something you can change other than adding 10,000 to the year on the clock on the fly, since a lot of services rely on time and date settings, you can't just set your time to +10,000 years and expect everything to work smoothly. One example is web browsing, many sites will exchange certificate information and if your date doesn't fall withing the validity span it will be invalid and all you will see would be "fraudulent" websites. The point is, you are better off only representing a date in the future rather than using it. One way could be to parse and add 10,000, like this:
echo "$(date +%Y) + 10000" | bc
arielnmz
Posted 2017-10-20T15:55:56.993
Reputation: 2 960
You're right, the good approach is to modify how dates are represented. I looked for a customized locale to do that, and I found this topic https://superuser.com/questions/587101/how-to-define-a-custom-locale. So it seems impossible this way.
So you want to exchange one (admittedly arbitrary) numbering system that every computer on the planet understands and can use to communicate with and replace it with one that no computer was designed to use and would mean that your computer would have to do more work to support. You would rewriting the entire system to use a 5 digit year and having to then convert from your "cool" time to "standard" time in order to talk to any other system in the world. I get that it's neat, but it's just as pointless a year numbering system as the current one with a lot more hassle involved in using it. – Mokubai – 2017-10-20T16:46:49.397
1My main point is that every tool written would assume up to 4 digits for the year, and changing that is a major undertaking for almost no gain whatsoever and a lot of pain as you'd end up rewriting everything else to then start stripping it back out whenever it was going to a file format or protocol that expected to see a "normal" date... – Mokubai – 2017-10-20T16:53:33.377
@Mokubai every bad tool would assume up to 4 digits, in the end it's just representing the seconds since the epoch, and representing them on the fly. Wether it was 2000 or 12000 years, I think tools should be time-proof. Also, I'm in favor of the HE calendar, since it's a better basis than that of the CE, but whatever; it only shows how arbitrary calendars are. – arielnmz – 2017-10-20T17:00:36.243
1So you want "epoch" to have started 315569520000 seconds earlier? As a minimum that would still mean a lot of conversion to and from this new epoch in order to communicate with any other machine on the planet. I can get behind switching from 32 to 64-bits to count our epoch start point as it will be much more future proof, but not changing the start point that everyone knows... you might as well just count the number of seconds since the big bang instead as it would allow us to put every event on a natural scale. – Mokubai – 2017-10-20T17:07:53.757
The number 12017 reminds me the story when they meet this highlander and he says: 'See those mountains? They are 300 million and five years old!' 'And five years old? How can you tell so precisely?' 'It's easy. Five years ago this famous professor visited here and he told me they were 300 million years old.' – Kamil Maciorowski – 2017-10-20T20:14:10.557
My point here is to see how difficult it is to setup non-standard numbering system. This is somewhat similar to time zones: computers uses a common date system (UTC) to compare events, and users reads in their own local date system (CEST, …). – jorispilot – 2017-10-26T11:39:53.173