Darren Reed wrote:
> At present most of the OpenSolaris documents seem to use the US date
> format of MM/DD/YY (ie. fast track documents for PSARC.) Besides
> dates like 08/08/08, there are times when 05/06/07 can be interpreted
> any number of ways, depending on which locale you're from. Not so much
> fun until you remember to load the North American locale filter into your
> brain.
>
> For the purpose of filling out forms and other official documentation that
> requires a date, I'd like to propose that we implement an OpenSolaris wide
> change to a date format that cannot be confused for anything other than
> what it is:
>
> YYYY-MMM-DD
>
> e.g. 2008-Apr-24
>
> While ISO 8601 specifies the format should be YYYY-MM-DD (or
> 2008-04-24) and adopting it would mean we can say we're ISO 8601
> compliant, moving to this format could be confusing for Americans and
> that would defeat the purpose of this proposal: to move to a date format
> that cannot be confused with the wrong date.
>
> Of course this doesn't apply to www.opensolaris.org's front page (where
> we have "May 5, 2008") but in general, it might be a good idea to move
> away from using two digits for the month regardless of where/how.
+1 from me on this idea. It annoys the heck out of me that
I have to be mindful of where a correspondent is from in
order to work out which date they're talking about. That
and timezone abbreviations!
I'll follow your suggestion with a request that if we're
going to specify timezones, could we please _spell out_
the name of the zone.
Eg - US/Pacific
US/Mountain
US/Eastern
Europe/Gibraltar
Europe/Moscow
Asia/Dhaka
Asia/Shanghai
Australia/Queensland
Pacific/Auckland
That way you can easily plug in the timezone and work out the
date/time, ala
TZ=Pacific/Auckland /usr/bin/date
Removing doubt as to what a date or timezone is would seem
to me to be a very good thing.
James C. McPherson
--
Senior Kernel Software Engineer, Solaris
Sun Microsystems
http://blogs.sun.com/jmcp http://www.jmcp.homeunix.com/blog
