On today's Austin Group meeting, the question of whether some form of
'date -d "..."' should be specified. While there is no way that POSIX
would standardize everything that GNU date can parse, there was an idea
that supporting '@seconds' since Epoch, plus all of the formats already
required to be supported by the 'at' utility
https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/at.html might
be acceptable.
But that would imply that we want gnulib's date parser to be a superset
of the grammar required by 'at'. We are already most of the way there;
required support dates such as '2pm + 1 week', '2pm next week', and
'tomorrow' work; but we are lacking at least 'midnight'. Thus, I'm
opening this bug to remind us to add the remaining few items to our date
grammar, so that we can parse everything 'at' is required to support,
and in case POSIX does decide to standardize -d using the 'at' grammar
as a starting point.
--
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc. +1-919-301-3226
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