On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 07:47:36PM -0400, Mark J. Reed wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 7:40 PM, Patrick R. Michaud<pmich...@pobox.com> wrote:
> \> Unfortunately, the .rpm format doesn't allow hyphens in package
> > version numbers, so we probably need to switch to something different.
> > The "obvious" choices would be things like "2009.07" or "200907",
> > but neither of those represent valid ISO8601 formatted dates (the
> > hyphened version is a valid date).
>
> Not true. Most delimiters are optional according to ISO-8601,
> including the hyphens between date components, the "T" between date
> and time, and the colons between time components.
The hyphen is not optional when only the day-of-month has been omitted.
See ISO 8601:2004 section 4.1.2.3 ("Representations with reduced
date accuracy") [1]:
If in a given application it is sufficient to express a
calendar date with less accuracy than a complete representation
as specified in 4.1.2.2, either two, four or six digits may be
omitted, the omission starting from the extreme right-hand side.
The resulting representation will then indicate a month, a
year or a century, as set out below. When only [DD] is omitted,
a separator shall be inserted between [YYYY] and [MM], but
separators shall not be used in the other representations with
reduced accuracy.
Thus "2009-05-11", "20090511", and "2009-05" are all valid ISO 8601
dates, but "200905" is not valid ISO 8601 because the separator is
required when only the day-of-month is omitted from the date.
Thanks,
Pm
[1]
http://isotc.iso.org/livelink/livelink/4021199/ISO_8601_2004_E.zip?func=doc.Fetch&nodeid=4021199,
link taken from wikipedia.org [2]
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
