Re: Recommendations for man pages in Debian (was: Debian Policy 3.8.3.0 released: localized manpages)
On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 12:21:38PM +0100, Alastair McKinstry wrote:
>>>
>>
>> It's only unambiguous if you know the convention being adopted /is/
>> ISO-8601. In an ideal world, we could have a standardised date format
>> which the man program can transform into the date representation of
>> the user's locale thus satisfying all requirements.
>
> Thats what ISO-8601 is. There is no other format that goes XXXX-YY-ZZ.
In the context of dates, yes. But since that field isn't standardised
to be a date, that might be too big an assuption.
I'd be happy to convert my manpages to use ISO-8601 dates. However,
that would require groff and man to specify it formally and display
it correctly using LC_TIME D_FMT. It deserves wider adoption outside
Debian (and Linux).
If the groff and man upstreams agree, it might be worth displaying any
of the extra1/2/3 fields using D_FMT if they parse as an ISO-8601 date,
or D_T_FMT if they include a time as well. Ideally this should be done
in groff.
Regards,
Roger
--
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