Re: policy around 'wontfix' bug tag

[Jonathan de Boyne Pollard <J.deBoynePollard-newsgroups@NTLWorld.COM>]

Michael Stone:

Anyway, if there was a simple solution someone would have implemented it by now.

Indeed, that is the case; and it has been around for almost as long as those 20 years that you have been watching people use the GNU tool.  In 2001, Paul Jarc invented a fairly simple notation for such things; providing what is effectively a mini-language, made out of chaining programs and using environment variables for variables, with add, sub, min, max, statfile, and match operators.

* http://code.dogmap.org/runwhen/example/

* http://code.dogmap.org/runwhen/stamp-fmt/

* http://code.dogmap.org/runwhen/

Xe even went through the second-system-effect process of not liking the first way that xe implemented it.

* http://code.dogmap.org/runwhen/caldelay/

Leаh Neukirchen took the old caldelay idea, and turned environment variables into command-line options.

* https://github.com/chneukirchen/snooze

Although add n d1s now1s match $now1s ,H=2,M=30 wake statfile started add $MTAI64N d1H earliest max $wake $earliest wake (which is effectively a prefix notation which in an infix form would be something like $now1s := now add d1s ; $wake := $now1s findnextmatching H=2,M=30 ; $MTAI64N := timestampof started ; $earliest := $MTAI64N add d1H ; $wake := $wake max $earliest) is more along the lines that you were writing about earlier.  (One can imagine a pair of date calculator tools akin to dc and bc that understand the prefix and infix forms.)