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

On Sat, 6 Aug 2016, Baptiste Daroussin wrote:

> 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:
> > >>
> > >> 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.

Regardless, at a new major release is precisely when it is permissible to
break POLA.

> 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)

As I understand it, your change will improve the maintainability of
locales in FreeBSD in the future, which justifies a POLA break at the
release boundary.

-Ben