bug#26081: --date=STRING error that started midnight 3/12

[Fevzi Karavelioglu]

Thank you yes, the debug option is going to be very useful.

Fevzi

On 3/13/17 9:06 PM, Pádraig Brady wrote:
> On 13/03/17 05:17, Eric Blake wrote:
> > tag 26081 notabug
> > thanks
> >
> > On 03/13/2017 12:09 AM, Fevzi Karavelioglu wrote:
> > > Hello, I started getting an error with the following command:
> > >
> > > $> date --date="02:05 tomorrow" +%s
> > > *date: invalid date `02:05 tomorrow'*
> > >
> > > It appears any time 2 in the morning causes the error. But everything else
> > > appears to work fine. This appears to have started after midnight on March
> > > 12 2017. May be something to do with daylight saving as it starts at 2AM?
> > Everything to do with daylight savings.  In fact, it's a FAQ:
> > https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/faq/coreutils-faq.html#The-date-command-is-not-working-right_002e
> >
> > You're trying to start from a time that doesn't exist in your timezone,
> > due to it falling within the hour that was skipped.  Which is why we
> > recommend that date-relative commands be executed relative to noon
> > rather than midnight, since no (known) timezone makes their daylight
> > savings adjustments at noon, and even if the relative operations land at
> > 11 am or 1 pm after crossing the boundary, you still end up in the right
> > relative day.
> >
> >
> > > *$> date --versiondate (GNU coreutils) 8.13Copyright (C) 2011 Free Software
> > Newer versions of coreutils come with a 'date --debug' option that give
> > you even more insight into failures, including your use case of
> > specifying a time that does not exist in your time zone.
> >
> > I'm closing this as not a bug, but feel free to add further comments to
> > the thread.
> For completeness the --debug option outputs:
>
> TZ=America/Los_Angeles date --debug --date="12 Mar 2017 02:05" +%s
> date: parsed date part: (Y-M-D) 2017-03-12
> date: parsed time part: 02:05:00
> date: input timezone: -08:00 (set from TZ="America/Los_Angeles" environment 
> value)
> date: using specified time as starting value: '02:05:00'
> date: error: invalid date/time value:
> date:     user provided time: '(Y-M-D) 2017-03-12 02:05:00 TZ=-08:00'
> date:        normalized time: '(Y-M-D) 2017-03-12 03:05:00 TZ=-08:00'
> date:                                             --
> date:      possible reasons:
> date:        non-existing due to daylight-saving time;
> date:        numeric values overflow;
> date:        missing timezone
> date: invalid date ‘12 Mar 2017 02:05’
>
> cheers,
> Pádraig