I tend to agree, not only for date parsing, but plain "language" parsing, it's best to force LC_ALL=C before running whatever tool you want to inspect the output of. I can add a release notes task to this and update them.
** Also affects: ubuntu-release-notes Importance: Undecided Status: New -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Touch seeded packages, which is subscribed to coreutils in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1858883 Title: date utility format unexpectedly changed after upgrade from bionic to focal Status in Release Notes for Ubuntu: New Status in coreutils package in Ubuntu: New Bug description: After upgrading my Bionic system to Focal, I noticed a significant change in the output of the `date` utility. This could potentially cause regressions for those who are relying on a consistent date format when using `date` in shell scripts. EXPECTED BEHAVIOR ================= I expected to see the same date format that can be seen on Ubuntu releases (at least) from Trusty through Bionic: $ date -u Wed Jan 8 21:00:14 UTC 2020 ACTUAL BEHAVIOR =============== On Focal (and Eoan) the following date format is seen by default: $ date -u Wed 08 Jan 2020 09:00:14 PM UTC Note the differences in zero-padding, whitespace, placement of the year, and the extraneous "PM" (I had expected to see a 24-hour time). FURTHER DETAILS =============== This machine was originally on Bionic and has been upgraded to development releases between Bionic and Focal. $ locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8 LANGUAGE= LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8" LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8" LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8" LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8" LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8" LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8" LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8" LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8" LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8" LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8" LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8" LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8" LC_ALL= To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-release-notes/+bug/1858883/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~touch-packages Post to : touch-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~touch-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp