Re: policy around 'wontfix' bug tag
On Mon, 05 Feb 2018, Richard Hector wrote:
> 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?
>From day one, yes.
But it didn't, and that Utterly Bad Pattern became an stable ABI which
you cannot just change due to the breakage it would cause on scripts
around the world.
--
Henrique Holschuh
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