Prework

• I understand and agree to targets' code of conduct.
• I understand and agree to targets' contributing guidelines.
• New features take time and effort to create, and they take even more effort to maintain. So if the purpose of the feature is to resolve a struggle you are encountering personally, please consider first posting a "trouble" or "other" issue so we can discuss your use case and search for existing solutions first.

Proposal

Timestamps stored in _targets/meta/meta and returned in the time column of tar_meta() output are doubles, not a time format. It seems to me the bulk of use cases of this data (e.g., triggering based on out-of-date targets) would make use of this in POSIXct format. I'm not sure if there is a reason to avoid this in storage but it seems default behavior should be to return it in a date format. Currently converting via as.POSIXct(), requires one to know the origin, and it isn't clear whether the origin comes from R or the filesystem and might not hold moving the cache across machines.