lfpinit() signed or unsigned?

[Eric S. Raymond]

Achim Gratz <Stromeko at nexgo.de>:
> Hal Murray writes:
> > How about something like l_fp_time (unsigned) and l_fp_delta or l_fp_offset 
> > (signed)?
> 
> The l_fp timestamps must be unsigned since they are just counting
> seconds from the beginning of the epoch.  That means that there's an
> assumption somewhere in NTP that differences between those timestamps,
> which are necessarily signed unless you want to carry the direction of
> the difference as a separate datum, are limited to less or equal than
> half the range of that type.  If you compute that difference in modulo
> arithmetic, then timestamp differences between two adjacent epochs are
> still valid as long as the true time difference is less than half an
> epoch.  In other words, you don't have to explicitly check for the epoch
> of either timestamp if you assume that these are less than 68 years
> apart.

I also confirm this.
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