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Re: Bug#4329: Emacs has hardcoded path for jka-compr, breaks at upgrade



This is really off-topic, but it's one of my pet peeves. Sorry.

Rob Browning:
> 5) Debian should use either the big or little endian format and always
> use four digits for the year.  That way we won't have trouble when the
> millenium hits, and you can always tell by looking if it's big or
> little endian.

I've had some experience with how people from all over the world
write dates. I used to fix dates by hand for the LSM database
(it's automatic now, and people who send them must check
them). The only official LSM date format is ddMMMyy, where dd
is two digits for day of month, MMM is first the letters of the
English name of the month, and yy is the last two digits of the
year (which lets us reach the 2090's). All other date formats
seem to invite a large number of errors. For reasons unknown,
people _will_ write dates in the form yyyy-dd-mm. Don't ask me
why, but they do. Up to several percent of them.

Having the month spelled out as text is the only way to make
dates unambiguous.

(I don't care if date formats are stupid or not, just whether
they work.)

-- 
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