From: GOTO Masanori <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2000 07:19:34 +0900
I cannot [agree with] your opinion; "date" has always printed the
time zone by default.
Sorry, I meant the original Unix tradition. You're correct that
"date" is not required to print the time zone in non-POSIX locales,
though I cannot recommend omitting the time zone as this makes the
output ambiguous. (Some day Japan may start using daylight-saving
time again; at that point you'll come to appreciate having a time zone
indicator by default. :-)
* If a system have locales and it is NOT used in the POSIX locale,
it should display as d_t_fmt.
This isn't a good approach, as it conflates strftime's %c with the
output of "date". Traditionally, they expanded to different strings,
and we shouldn't force them to be the same.
Solaris attacks this problem by having a localedef keyword date_fmt
that defines the output of date. This is a better solution. For
example, for the ja_JP.UTF-8 locale, Solaris 7 uses the following
definitions:
d_t_fmt "%Y<U5E74>%m<U6708>%d<U65E5><space>%H<U6642>%M<U5206>%S<U79D2>"
era_d_t_fmt "%EY%m<U6708>%d<U65E5><space>%H<U6642>%M<U5206>%S<U79D2>"
date_fmt
"%Y<U5E74>%m<U6708>%d<U65E5><space><left-parenthesis>%a<right-parenthesis><space>%H<U6642>%M<U5206>%S<U79D2><space>%Z"
Here d_t_fmt corresponds to strftime %c,
era_d_t_fmt corresponds to strftime %Ec, and
date_fmt corresponds to the output of "date".
Only date_format has the time zone %Z.
As I mentioned earlier, glibc strftime could follow the Olson
library's lead and use %+ to generate date_fmt. Another possibility,
which I didn't mention earlier, is to follow Solaris's lead, and to
have nl_langinfo (_DATE_FMT) return date_fmt. An advantage of
_DATE_FMT is that it's easier for "date" to autoconfigure at
compile_time, even with cross-compiles. The former approach is easier
to do at run-time, though, and this might be nice too, for some
applications. Perhaps glibc should do both.
So I think a better way to way to fix this is:
1. Modify glibc localedef to support date_fmt as shown above.
I assume that this can be done upward-compatibly,
but I haven't checked this.
2. Modify glibc so that nl_langinfo (_DATE_FMT) returns date_fmt,
and so that strftime %+ expands to date_fmt.
3. Modify GNU date to use nl_langinfo (_DATE_FMT) if available.
(3) is needed for the Solaris port of GNU sh-utils regardless of any
change to glibc, so I'll volunteer to do this and will send a patch to
the GNU date maintainer, with a CC: to you.
Can you do (1) and (2)? Probably the documentation is the hardest part.
The order of "%a %b %e %H:%M:%S %Z %Y" is correct in English,
No, actually, it's bad English too. I'm a native-English speaker, and
I would never say a date and time in that order.
