Your message dated Sun, 20 Apr 2008 10:03:57 -0400
with message-id <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
and subject line Re: Bug#476974: coreutils: date -d '18:00 -1 hour' wrong answer
has caused the Debian Bug report #476974,
regarding coreutils: date -d '18:00 -1 hour' wrong answer
to be marked as done.
This means that you claim that the problem has been dealt with.
If this is not the case it is now your responsibility to reopen the
Bug report if necessary, and/or fix the problem forthwith.
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--
476974: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=476974
Debian Bug Tracking System
Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] with problems
--- Begin Message ---
Package: coreutils
Version: 6.10-6
Severity: normal
These results are correct:
griffon:~$ date
Sun Apr 20 09:44:18 EDT 2008
griffon:~$ date -d 'Sun Apr 20 18:00:00 EDT 2008 -1 hour'
Sun Apr 20 17:00:00 EDT 2008
griffon:~$ date -d '18:00:00 EDT -1 hour'
Sun Apr 20 17:00:00 EDT 2008
But if I leave off the time zone name, I get:
griffon:~$ date -d '18:00:00 -1 hour'
Sun Apr 20 15:01:00 EDT 2008
griffon:~$ date -d '18:00:00 -4 hour'
Sun Apr 20 15:04:00 EDT 2008
griffon:~$ date -d '18:00:00 -5 hour'
Sun Apr 20 15:05:00 EDT 2008
This is clearly not correct or useful behavior.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.24-1-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_US.ISO8859-1, LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO8859-1 (charmap=ISO-8859-1)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Versions of packages coreutils depends on:
ii libacl1 2.2.39-1 Access control list shared library
ii libc6 2.7-10 GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii libselinux1 2.0.59-1 SELinux shared libraries
coreutils recommends no packages.
-- debconf-show failed
--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message ---
The natural language date parsing code is a big hairy mess, and wasn't a
good idea in the first place. If someone wants to submit a patch I'm
sure it will be considered. But I'm not going to try to fix it myself,
and I'm not going to leave bugs open on it.
Try this syntax instead:
date -d '18:00:00 5 hours ago'
Sun Apr 20 13:00:00 EDT 2008
In general, you need to just try different things until you get the
result you're expecting, you can't expect it to do something you think
is logical. My preference would be to rip it out and replace it with a
structured/constrained syntax, but then debian would be incompatible
with everything else (including prior versions) so that's not
particularly great either.
Mike Stone
--- End Message ---
