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Re: ls has stopped using the ISO date format



On Sun, 30 May 2010 18:59:47 +0300, Andrei Popescu wrote:

> On Sun,30.May.10, 09:19:03, Camaleón wrote:
>> 
>> Having an option to change the default is very good, but ISO date
>> representation is there precisely to avoid the date localization
>> madness,
> 
> Why "madness"? IMHO the *default* output should be easy to understand by
> the user and a localized date makes sense.

No sir, the localized format it's a mess.

The only date format understable by *any* user in the world is the ISO 
format, we all should move to that. 
 
>> so I for one would also expect as default the using of ISO date
>> standard.
> 
> Even if ISO is a standard, it's not the *usual* representation of a date
> for too many users to use it as a default.

The usual representation is very fuzzy. Look:

sm01@stt008:~$ locale | grep TIME
LC_TIME="es_ES.UTF-8"

sm01@stt008:~$ ls -l
total 1
drwxr-xr-x 9 sm01 sm01 728 may 29 22:22 Desktop
drwxr-xr-x 9 sm01 sm01 240 may 16 16:13 Documentos
drwx------ 3 sm01 sm01  72 nov 14  2009 file:
drwxr-xr-x 2 sm01 sm01  48 dic 27 21:10 News
drwx------ 2 sm01 sm01  48 abr 30 21:22 PDF

"May 29"... from what year? Ah, o.k. as there is no year printed it 
should be the actual one, and the actual year is 2010. Fine.

"May 16", the same.

"Nov 14"?... ah, o.k., it's printed 2009.

"Dec 27"? oops, no "2009" printed? well, right, but 2010 cannot be 
(future date), then it must be 2009. I hope...

Let's try with the long iso format:

sm01@stt008:~$ export TIME_STYLE=long-iso

sm01@stt008:~$ ls -l
total 1
drwxr-xr-x 9 sm01 sm01 728 2010-05-29 22:22 Desktop
drwxr-xr-x 9 sm01 sm01 240 2010-05-16 16:13 Documentos
drwx------ 3 sm01 sm01  72 2009-11-14 19:58 file:
drwxr-xr-x 2 sm01 sm01  48 2009-12-27 21:10 News
drwx------ 2 sm01 sm01  48 2010-04-30 21:22 PDF

This way I have to think *less* to be sure about the date. No guessing.

Greetings,

-- 
Camaleón


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