Bug#9353: 9353 -- wishlist or close?

[Thomas Hood <jdthood@yahoo.co.uk>]

Report 9353, dating from 1997, concerns /usr/bin/822-date.
(It is no longer part of dpkg.  It is now part of dpkg-dev.)
The original request was to eliminate it and use
date -R instead.  The two do seem to produce similar results:

jdthood@thanatos:~$ 822-date
Sun,  6 Oct 2002 10:09:51 +0200
jdthood@thanatos:~$ date -R
Sun, 06 Oct 2002 10:09:53 +0200

However, Klee Dienes wrote that he did not wish to make dpkg
depend on the date command.  In Debian it is part of shellutils,
which is Essential: yes.  However, he was concerned about
portability of dpkg to other distros.

What is the current view?  If porting to date -R is planned,
this report can be set to severity wishlist.  Otherwise this
report can be closed.

--
Thomas Hood