Re: RFC regarding usage of ISO 8601 throughout the tree

On Wednesday, January 05, 2011 6:40:09 pm Miroslav Lachman wrote:
> Ulrich Spörlein wrote:
> > On Wed, 05.01.2011 at 19:00:31 +0100, Julian H. Stacey wrote:
> >> 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 ?
> >
> > Exactly.
> >
> >>> 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.
> >
> > Yes, I think for lists of dates like in UPDATING or automatically
> > generated date output like syslogd, the ISO8601 format only has
> > advantages.
> 
> I am using ISO8601 date + time format for years in my scripts, logs 
> etc., so it would be nice to have it on all places of FreeBSD as a 
> standard format.
> I think 2010-07-20 is really readable than 20100720 or 2010/07/20 and 
> "2011-01-06 00:03:50" is better than "Jan  6 00:03:50"  (in logs)

Changing the format of syslog messages is guaranteed to break ${INFINITY} 
scripts and other log parsing tools.  I think that is too large of a POLA 
violation to justify.

I also don't find the format used in UPDATING that hard to read as I use it on 
an almost daily basis myself.  Given that the format in UPDATING is already 
compliant, this mostly seems to be a gratuitous change.

-- 
John Baldwin