BUILDTIME: ISO 8601 format [PATCH]

Ralph Siemsen ralphs at netwinder.org
Tue Nov 29 18:25:06 UTC 2005


Shaun Jackman wrote:
> I'd prefer to see a standard ISO 8601 time format used. Specifying a
> "+0000" time zone is redundant; UTC is assumed if the time zone is not
> specified. Please apply.

> -BUILDTIME := $(shell TZ=UTC date -u "+%Y.%m.%d-%H:%M%z")
> +BUILDTIME := $(shell TZ=UTC date -u "+%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M")

Any change you make to this is likely to break existing places that 
check the time.  How many such places exist, I don't know.

I really dislike the "T" in the middle of the string.  Aside from the 
human parsing issue, the other problem with this format is, that it is 
crying out to be "internationalized" at some point.  Non-english 
speakers will (legitimately) want the "T" to be something else, and next 
we'll have to use UTF-8 encoding on our date strings...

I realize there is an ISO standard, unfortunately, it is hardly the only 
one in existance!

So please, don't put random letters into the time string.  Don't put in 
UTC, EST, MDT, or other terms that are subject to the ever-changing 
opinions of lawyers and "governing bodies" around the world.

If it was up to me, I would take out the TZ=UTC, so that local time is 
displayed, along with the (numeric) time zone offset.  That's most 
useful to the developer who wants to make sure he's got the right 
version of his code (presumably the one he just compiled) on the system.

That's my $0.02 anyways.
-R



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