Re: date parsing on "bite-sized tasks" list

On Wed, Aug 22, 2001 at 08:42:22AM +0200, Branko Hibej wrote:
>...
> My suggestion would be to do the following:
>
> * For input:
> * Always acept ISO 8601 dates, times, and intervals
> * Accept dates conforming to the current locale settings (as
> modified by --locale), wherever those can be guessed
> * Accept unambiguous "common" designations, such as
> "yesterday", "next monday" (and possibly "easter" and
> "sammain", if you can work those out. :-)

Agreed.

> * For output:
> * Write dates in the format defined by the current locale
> * As a possible exception, with --locale=C, write dates in ISO
> 8601 format.

For user-visible dates: yes. For internal date strings, we should only use
ISO 8601. In particular, I've noticed that SVN/entries uses a wacky format:

    Tue 21 Aug 2001 20:00:19.000000 (day 233, dst 1, gmt_off -25200)

That is just overly complex and will be difficult for "foreign" utilities to
deal with. For example, "Tue" and "day 233" are useless since they are
derived values. And the zone stuff is all useless since stored times should
be in UTC. ISO 8601 specifies a well-defined format for this stuff.

See:

    http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html
    http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime

Cheers,
-g

-- 
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/
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