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Re: policy around 'wontfix' bug tag



On 05/02/18 00:43, Nicolas George wrote:
> 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.

In which case, it should refuse to accept '4/2/2018' at all, right?

I almost always uses YYYY-MM-DD, except when filling in a form with
spaces provided - in which case I'll write (eg) 'Feb' in the month
space, to avoid ambiguity.

Richard

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