Control: reopen -1 Hi Georges,
On 2025-12-13 15:53:55 +0100, Georges Khaznadar wrote: > Hello Vincent, > > I read carefully your first bug report again, and here is an excerpt: > > crontab 12/11/2025 > CRONTAB(5) > > That does *not* mean 12 November 2025, when you consider that for people > with en_US.UTF-8 locale, the default date format is MDY > (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_date_formats_by_country) > > With the en_US.UTF-8 local, that means 11 December 2025. > So there is no bug. Well, the US are a minor part of the world. And more importantly, I am *not* using the en_US.UTF-8 locale (and I am probably not alone). Anyway, the date is not generated dynamically, and for the man pages, the language is usually not tied to a territory in Debian (except for pt and zh); see the contents of the /usr/share/man/ directory. So you should not assume a particular territory. > Do not worry, both of us are living in France, where the date format is > DMY: people of the translation team are doing an amazing work, > and they always translated the date correctly to French standards. I don't see what the (French?) translation team has to do here, as I was pointing the problem on the English man pages. FYI, I always read the man pages in English (more up-to-date, and also to avoid translation errors). In any case, people living in UK and Australia would also be concerned. The recommandations for a neutral date format are either to write the month in English (not as a number) or to use the ISO 8601 date format (YYYY-MM-DD). For instance, the former was chosen for cron in bookworm, and the latter is chosen for perl and procps-ng. With the month in English, several forms can be chosen, e.g.: * 19 April 2010 for cron in bookworm; * January 19, 2003 for dash; * 2025 April 7 for bash. The first form seems dominant in the world, but for each case, there is no ambiguity and no risk of misinterpretation. So all of them are OK, IMHO. -- Vincent Lefèvre <[email protected]> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <https://www.vinc17.net/blog/> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Pascaline project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)
