URL: <http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?23767>
Summary: ISO-8601 and "date" Project: GNU Core Utilities Submitted by: None Submitted on: Friday 07/04/2008 at 22:11 UTC Category: None Severity: 3 - Normal Item Group: None Status: None Privacy: Public Assigned to: None Open/Closed: Open Discussion Lock: Any _______________________________________________________ Details: Sorry if I'm being dense, this seems to be an issue that comes up with some regularity. The ISO 8601 format for date/time specifications is well-known; in particular, it is described reasonably fully on wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601. RFC 2822 and RFC 3339, by contrast, do not even have Wikipedia articles, not even stubs. It is also, I admit, the only reasonably compact format for specifying a time/date format that I know of. "20080704T215923Z" is still somewhat human-readable, unlikely to be mistaken for a local time because the "T" and "Z" are exotic enough to stop people just making assumptions about how to interpret the string, the format allows alphabetic sorting ... In short, I don't see what's wrong with it and I'm interminably confused by the fact that it's not date's default format. But it isn't even supported as an input format for -d! There is an --iso-8601 option, but it's undocumented! What's up with this? Is it some sort of politically motivated campaign? If there actually were any harm in understanding, at least, the week-number-free "T"-separated date/time string with a "Z" suffix, shouldn't that at least be documented somewhere? _______________________________________________________ Reply to this item at: <http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?23767> _______________________________________________ Message sent via/by Savannah http://savannah.gnu.org/ _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils