Re: [ebxml-msg]

[Dan Weinreb <dlw@exceloncorp.com>]

   Date: Tue, 06 Nov 2001 11:07:52 -0500
   From: Martin W Sachs <mwsachs@us.ibm.com>

   You are still comparing a date and time to an interval.  You need to either
   convert TimeToLive to an interval since some date-time origin or add a
   date-time origin to Retriesx RetryInterval.

It's really too bad that we have a field called "TimeToLive" whose
value is a date/time rather than an interval.  The phrase "time to
live" strongly suggests an interval, as in:

"You have only this much time left to live"

or

"Unfortuantely for you, Mr. Bond, your time to live is only three
minutes, after which this bomb will go off!  Ha, ha ha!"

The Java JMS specification uses timeToLive as the name of a paramter
that is interpreted as an interval (a number of milliseconds).  The

Netscape LDAP Universal Schema contains "ttl (time to live)", an
interval (in seconds).

The International Telecommunication Union published a note called
"Expiration Dates for H.323 Endpoint Registrations", saying:

   n AVC-1159 it was proposed that an optional Expiration Date be added
   to the RRQ and RCF messages. Because using an absolute time requires
   synchronization of clocks between the endpoint and the gatekeeper, the
   name ExpirationDate is changed to TimeToLive and the definition is
   changed to be the number of seconds that the registration is to be
   considered valid.

By using TimeToLive to mean an absolute time, we are going against the
rest of the industry.

Is there any chance that we could come up with an improved name for this
field?