Add a wall clock helper so that statedumps can be written and re-read

1 files changed, 9 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/DESIGN b/DESIGN
index eb8679e..35928b4 100644
--- a/DESIGN
+++ b/DESIGN
@@ -103,6 +103,15 @@ ordinary announce interval is a constant too and an operator has nothing to
 measure a different value against. Over HTTP a refusal stays a failure
 reason, which is the only place a user is told why.
 
+The state file keeps a wall clock minute, and it is the only thing in the
+tracker that reads that clock. Everything else runs off a monotonic one,
+where a time step cannot evict a swarm, but a file outlives the process that
+wrote it and minutes since this boot mean nothing to the next run. So the
+dump converts on the way out and load_state converts on the way back in, and
+what lands on disk is the format opentracker has written for years. A step
+between writing and reading mis-dates a torrent by the size of the step,
+which costs it part of its last day and nothing else.
+
 Startup and teardown order
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