Re: [PATCH] Unify human represented timestamp formats.

Nuutti Kotivuori <naked@iki.fi> writes:
> I made a patch which adds a new function, svn_time_to_human_nts, and
> then uses it for the places where the date format is mangled for user
> display.
>
> The actual format of the date stamps is:
> 2002-06-22 11:14:42 +03:00

I'd add weekday in there, it's very important, IMHO (I'm sorry if I
didn't say that when you were earlier soliciting comments on date
formats, it was just an oversight.)

Yes, I know this theoretically opens up a whole can of worms about
non-English day and month names. But, intercultural offensiveness
aside, it's *really convenient* to have even just the English, and a
lot of people in the world understand the short English abbreviations
"Mon", "Tue", etc.

> The format can - and should - be changed if a real consensus is gotten
> for the format.

Okay, I'd like to propose:

   Sat 2002-06-22 11:14:42 +03:00

Personal aside: I suspect this might be hard to get consensus on, but
really the ideal thing for human readability (or at least
English-reader readability) would be to use the month name as well, as
in:

   Sat 22 Jun 2002 11:14:42 +03:00

That's _slightly_ more complicated for automated parsers, though, so
personally I'd have no problem with a redundant format like:

   Sat 22 Jun 2002-06-22 11:14:42 +03:00

...but I suppose that would cause much gnashing of teeth and hurling
of sticks and stones, right?

> The dubious part is 'svnlook'. Should that use this same function?
> This means that TZ needs to be set very carefully for it. I'd want
> some input on this.

Oh, the question is, should it print dates in the server's local
timezone, or should it print exactly what is stored in the repository
(which is probably GMT, or maybe some other non-local timezone)?

<thinks>

You know, I think we need both options. I'm not sure which should be
the default, though.

Hmmm. I'm beginning to wonder if we don't really need a date format
string with %-codes, settable from .subversion/config or
something...

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Received on Sat Jun 22 21:29:44 2002