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Re: RFC: a human-eye date format everyone can love

From: Justin Erenkrantz <jerenkrantz_at_apache.org>
Date: 2002-06-24 21:39:28 CEST

On Mon, Jun 24, 2002 at 12:17:38PM -0500, Karl Fogel wrote:
> Please read "RFC" as "Request For Consensus"... :-)
>
> Now that Hadaka has committed the bulk of the new date output code, we
> should decide on a human-output date format. Currently, svn is
> printing:
>
> "Mon, 24 Jun 2002 10:36:04 -0500"
>
> ...but we all know this is just a placeholder until we figure out what
> we really want. On IRC just now, Hadaka came up with a neat solution,
> which we'd like to propose together:
>
> "2002-06-24 10:36:04 -0500 (Mon 24 Jun)"

Pardon me, but why do we care about producing ISO-8601 dates in
the human-readable sections? If you want the ISO-8601 dates, why
don't you just write a client yourself? You shouldn't be parsing
the 'svn log' output - that's what client libraries are for. The
more complicated the human date is, the worse off *we* are. If
you are intending the human-readable sections to be read by a
computer, I think the preference must go to the humans not to
the computer.

I know I'm a giant stick in the mud. IMHO, this date format is
*way* too long. And, this is essentially what CVS is printing
with an additional TZ (and the human-friendly dates). I'm not sure
I understand why a human cares about the TZ - the repos time should
be translated to the timezone that the client computer is in.
Ostensibly, that's the time that the user knows best.

What TZ would we report when Karl commits in Chicago and Greg commits
in San Fransisco? For the human on 'svn log' output, they should be
the same, right? Or, are you suggesting that 'svn log' tells me that
Karl commits at 5AM and a later commit from Greg comes in at 4AM?
Or, do I get stuck with the timezone of the server? I think the best
solution is the timezone of the client - which means that the
timezone information in the human-readable format is
redundant. -- justin

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Received on Mon Jun 24 21:41:48 2002

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