Package: coreutils
Version: 6.10-6
Severity: important
See subject, setting the date is a popular source
of confusion for non-US citizens. This problem is especially PITA
because the string expected for -s is not documented well in the
manpage. Just assuming that it's the same format as the one from date's
output ends up in the missery shown in the log below. And when I try to
use the popular middle-european format, it fails too, see #211508 for
details.
The point of this bug report, that is that it's not a real problem to
construct the date string once you have found out that it needs the American
format. The problem is figuring the last thing out, because the first
natural user reaction to that error message is modifying the string,
changing positions of day/time, etc.pp. It repeatedly confused me and my
self in the last years, since the period between the times where you
really _need_ date tool is long enough to forget the syntax. Today I
talked to some colleagues and everyone remembered similar trouble but
couldn't tell the (essential) details.
The solutions I imagine are: either disable the localization of the
output, or tell on multiple places that the localization of input is not
supported, also adding an example for a typical Americal date string in
the manpage... (also making clear that day comes after month but before
year, *sic*).
whitestar:/root# echo $LANG
de_DE.UTF-8
whitestar:/root# echo $LC_C
whitestar:/root# locale | grep TIM
LC_TIME="de_DE.UTF-8"
whitestar:/root# date
Mi 11. Feb 21:35:10 CET 2009
whitestar:/root# date -s 'Mi 11. Feb 21:35:10 CET 2009'
date: ungültiges Datum „Mi 11. Feb 21:35:10 CET 2009“
(= "invalid date: ...")
whitestar:/root# unset LANG
whitestar:/root# date
Wed Feb 11 21:35:32 CET 2009
whitestar:/root# date -s 'Wed Feb 11 21:35:32 CET 2009'
Wed Feb 11 21:35:32 CET 2009
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 5.0
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.28 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Versions of packages coreutils depends on:
ii libacl1 2.2.47-2 Access control list shared library
ii libc6 2.7-18 GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii libselinux1 2.0.65-5 SELinux shared libraries
coreutils recommends no packages.
coreutils suggests no packages.
-- no debconf information
--
In der wissenschaftlichen Welt haben aber diese Gesinnungen
niemals gelten wollen; durchaus ist es auf Herrschen und Beherrschen
angesehen; und weil sehr wenige Menschen eigentlich selbständig sind,
so zieht die Menge den einzelnen nach sich.
-- Goethe, Maximen und Reflektionen, Nr. 837
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