Re: PDT timezone bug in GNU coreutils "date" v6.9

[gmane]

On Tue, 15 Jan 2008 22:06:38 -0800 Paul Eggert <address@hidden> 
wrote:

>The actual problem is the reverse of the original complaint.
>Coreutils should reject a usage like 'date -d "Tue Jan 14 08:25:26 

>EDT
>2008" +%s', because that time stamp is invalid.  Coreutils is not
>smart enough to correctly reject the time stamp now.  Fixing this 
>bug
>would take some time and is low priority.  In the mean time, 
>though,
>portable code shouldn't rely on invalid time stamps.

I'm a little confused by this assertion, can you please explain a 
little further?

Did you mean to say that converting any given time to epoch is 
invalid for time stamp purposes, or that the date/time format 
provided to the "-d" option in this particular example is an 
invalid time stamp?

If you meant the former, I'm afraid I'm a bit confused.

Typically the reason for converting to epoch (or julian for that 
matter) is to allow for easy machine comparison and sorting of 
date/time stamps.  In such case, if the data contains date/time 
stamps from multiple timezones, one must be able to convert to 
epoch relative to one's local timezone otherwise proper sorting can 
not be achieved.

If the latter, while you might be correct, I can assure you that 
this error occurs regardless of the time stamp format 
used/provided.

Thank you for your help!