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Re: policy around 'wontfix' bug tag



Richard Hector (2018-02-05):
> #389251 (coreutils: date's -d switch doesn't honour locale) - it's quite
> an old one. But I found another instance in which the same claim applies:
> 
> richard@zircon:~$ date -d '4/2/2018'
> Mon Apr  2 00:00:00 NZST 2018
> 
> In my NZ locale, that date should be interpreted as 4 Feb.

I would have to agree with coreutils: localizing parsing is an
aberration that should never have been implemented, and it is a good
thing that we progressively get rid of it.

Anecdote: more than 15 years ago, with some locales, if you were to call
gtk_init() from the OCaml interactive interpreter, and then issue "let
pi = 3.14;;", you would get "pi = 3.0", because gtk_init() would have
initialized locales and made the decimal separator a comma.

Never ever use "DD/MM/YYYY", "DD-MM-YYYY", "MM-DD-YYYY" nor
"MM/DD/YYYY". If your output is intended for humans, print your month
names; if your output is intended for computers, use the only logical
order: YYYY-MM-DD. It is standardized and understood by coreutils.

And if you need input from the user, provide a higher-level interface.

Regards,

-- 
  Nicolas George

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