Re: date(1) default format changed between 10.3 and 11.0-BETA3

From: Baptiste Daroussin <bapt_at_FreeBSD.org>
Date: Sat, 6 Aug 2016 12:00:53 +0200
On Sat, Aug 06, 2016 at 02:15:36PM +1000, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> On Friday,  5 August 2016 at 18:56:33 +0300, Andrey A. Chernov wrote:
> > On 05.08.2016 18:44, Mark Martinec wrote:
> >> On 2016-08-05 17:23, Andrey Chernov wrote:
> >>> On 05.08.2016 17:47, Mark Martinec wrote:
> >>>> [Bug 211598]
> >>>>   date(1) default format in en_EN locale breaks compatibility with 10.3
> >>>> and violates POSIX
> >>>>
> >>>> https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=211598
> >>>
> >>> It breaks compatibility but not violates POSIX. POSIX care of only its
> >>> own POSIX (or C) locale.
> >>
> >> POSIX does say that the default format should be the same
> >> as with "+%a %b %e %H:%M:%S %Z %Y".
> >> It also says that %a and %b are locale's abbreviated names.
> >
> > It is true for _POSIX_ locale only, as I already say. en_US.* is not
> > POSIX or C locale.
> 
> It still violates POLA.
> 
I really do not think that it violates POLA fiven that the behaviour you are
expecting is still available in the default configurtion that is still POSIX.

Set LC_TIME to C and then you are back on your behaviour (and this is the
default when you install FreeBSD).

locales should be seen as tzdata for exemple, they are a moving target
complicated to handle for every locale we do support: 78 for 11.0-RELEASE and
193 if we do count the encoding variants. locales are updated very often (for
exemple cldr unicode make a new release of the data every 8 month or so)

No locales defines the same date format and that was already the case before the
change we did

Now if people have strong arguments for a specific locale I'm inclined to add
some hacks in our tool that generates our locales to make sure we fix the
upstream data (http://cldr.unicode.org) we already committed some and I'm
planning to report upstream (cldr) all the issues we have faced to improve.

Best regards,
Bapt

Received on Sat Aug 06 2016 - 08:00:57 UTC

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