Re: Recommendations for man pages in Debian (was: Debian Policy 3.8.3.0 released: localized manpages)

[Nicolas François <nicolas.francois@centraliens.net>]

On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 08:13:20PM +1000, Ben Finney wrote:
> Roger Leigh <rleigh@codelibre.net> writes:
> 
> > I, for example, use the date format '+%d %b %Y' (01 Aug 2009). The
> > manual pages are human readable documentation. I think that nicely
> > readable dates should be preferred here.
> 
> This seems to falsely imply a necessary conflict between “nicely
> readable dates” and “ISO 8601 date representations”. The fact that
> they're simple and unambiguous, and to many readers interpretable
> without further explanation, I think makes them a good candidate for
> “nicely readable”.

This kind of conflict can be solved if the goal for ISO 8601 date
representations was to compare dates:
$ LC_ALL=C date -d'01 Aug 2009'
Sat Aug  1 00:00:00 CEST 2009
$ LC_ALL=C date -d'2009-08-01'
Sat Aug  1 00:00:00 CEST 2009

i.e. we can move from "ISO 8601 date representations" to "Is interpreted
correctly by `date -d'<date>'`"

However:
$ date -d'1er août 2009'
date: date invalide `1er août 2009'

Best Regards,
-- 
Nekral