id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	component	version	severity	resolution	keywords	cc	stage	has_patch	needs_docs	needs_tests	needs_better_patch	easy	ui_ux
21363	TimestampSigner.unsign should accept a timedelta for max_age	gwahl@…	Berker Peksag	"Currently, the max_age parameter to TimestampSigner.unsign is a number representing the max age of the signature as a number of seconds. In Python, the correct way to represent an time interval (an age) is a datetime.timedelta.

A timedelta is very obvious and readable:
    
{{{
max_age=datetime.timedelta(days=12)
}}}

Versus
{{{
max_age=12 * 24 * 60 * 60
}}}

A timedelta provides much better error reporting for long intervals: 'Signature age 1296123 > 1209600 seconds' versus 'Signature age 15 days, 0:02:03 > 14 days, 0:00:00'

A timedelta is also the intuitive type for the max_age parameter. I asked a few of my colleagues what they thought should be passed as a max_age, and all of them said a timedelta. Using a value object instead of a simple number also provides type safety by only allowing semantically valid operations.

It is unfortunate that to preserve backwards compatibility there is now more than one way to pass a timeout to unsign. My patch currently accepts both, but it would be easy to deprecate the seconds version.
"	Cleanup/optimization	closed	Core (Other)	dev	Normal	fixed		bmispelon@…	Ready for checkin	1	0	0	0	0	0