RFC regarding usage of ISO 8601 throughout the tree

[Julian H. Stacey]

Ulrich =?utf-8?B?U3DDtnJsZWlu?= wrote:
> !ACHTUNG BIKESHED ALERT!
> 
> Hello,
> 
> With the recent changes to the committer graphs, I again was reminded
> how much I hate the YYYY/MM/DD format (I can't help it ...). Given that

I guess & hope you mean you like linear decreasing order but 
dislike '/' as a delimeter & want to swap from '/' to '-' as in ISO ?


> this almost looks like ISO 8601, but is an unreadable variant of it, I
> would like to aggressively change this throughout the tree.
> 
> I'd like to start with minor stuff like share/misc/*.dot. Then probably
> src/UPDATING, and ports/UPDATING after I've identified the consumers of
> these docs.

Do you mean you would like to swap eg src/UPDATING 20100720 to eg
2010-07-20  ?  That would be more readable.


> The ultimate goal would be to change syslog's timestamp and ps(1)
> output, but that goal is far off ...

I've long had a mental note to get round to fixing isnd which emits:
	"05.01.2011 13:15:06" 
To 
	"2011-01-05 13:15:06"
However reading that URL, I see isdnd should have eg:
	2011-01-05T13:15:06
	2011-01-05T13:15:06+01:00
	2011-01-05T12:15:06Z
But that 'T' is hard to see, so either space it (allowed by ISO)
	2011-01-05 13:15:06
	2011-01-05 13:15:06+01:00
	2011-01-05 12:15:06Z
or lower case the 't' (if ISO allows ?)
	2011-01-05t13:15:06
	2011-01-05t13:15:06+01:00
	2011-01-05t12:15:06Z

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
> 
> Uli

Week numbers in ISO standard can (& should IMO) be ignored:
	Not much use for week numbers in FreeBSD,
		Dates when source code is released, & /var/logs get
		stamped etc, best without week numbers, just
		simplistic linearly progressive continuously
		decremental digit format (ie Year Month Day Hour
		Minute Second
	Week numbers not used much, eg
		I'm British, lived in Germany 25 years. First I
		ever saw of week numbers was in Germany, never saw
		them in Britain.

/usr/src/bin/date/
	Although default output of date eg
		Wed Jan  5 17:41:06 CET 2011
	is both non linear, & also non conformant in timezone (CET should
	be +01:00) it would open a can of worms to change default
	output, [unless it hangs on an env var.]  ...  [at least
	yet] ...  too many shells use it (in user's own code, not
	just in /usr/src & /usr/ports).

I don't see anything in `man date` to internaly emit timezone per ISO,
this works:
	echo "`date -u +%Y-%m-%dt%H:%M:%S`Z"
	echo "`date -u +%Y-%m-%dt%H:%M:%S`+00:00"
	echo "`date -v-1H +%Y-%m-%dt%H:%M:%S`Z"		# (as my TZ is -01:00)
but as that wouldnt do if nested inside more quotes from other shells,
we could add to date.c to emit an explicit timezone,
2 flags to add, I suggest:
	- '-U' to force '-u' & also swap output of eg "CET 2011" to
	  "2011Z" or "2011+00:00"	 ( '-U' is not yet used ).
 	- Some flag to specify a numeric string eg [+-][0-5][0-9]:[0-5][0-9]
	  (... maybe tie that in with man environ TZ tzset ? )

Cheers,
Julian
-- 
Julian Stacey, BSD Unix Linux C Sys Eng Consultants Munich http://berklix.com
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