Domas Mituzas wrote:
Hi,
This is documented in maintenance/tables.sql - check the comments at the top, it has something about timestamp fields.
Generally someone ages ago didn't like that TIMESTAMPs are auto- updated in MySQL and chose CHAR(14) instead of DATETIME.
I have heard that the culprit was Lee and that the problem was some kind of unspecified data import problem.
It would be pretty good idea to switch some day to datetime, and we have nearly all code in there. The sole problem is tables with tens of millions of rows to change. But that is doable, I suppose.
And in case anyone needs a cast, one can do that with say... ourfield +interval 0 second ;-)
I've never really felt the need to change it, personally. It's not like changing it would enable any extra features or anything. You can convert between the representations easily enough, in either PHP or SQL.
-- Tim Starling