Re: RFE: Modification to the Timezone Modifier

[Marko Myllynen]

Hi,

it's been a while but I now checked this again..

On 2013-12-10 02:49, Eric Blake wrote:
> On 12/09/2013 08:22 AM, Marko Myllynen wrote:
>>>> It seems like it would be reasonable to add some sort of modifier to the
>>>> existing %:::z to request suppression of leading 0.  If we didn't have
>>>> back-compat to worry about, I'd even suggest making %:::z be the short
>>>> form, and %0:::z be the 0-padded form.
> 
>>> sorry for the delayed reply and thanks for your insights - I've now
>>> filed http://austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=772 so let's see how it goes.
>>
>> the request has been rejected on the basis that there are no current
>> implementations.
>>
>> Based on all the above I'm not sure what to do at this point, should we
>> just live with this for few years and recheck at some point if the
>> proposal would be more acceptable then or do you see any viable options
>> to reach the desired result in the short/medium term?
> 
> The idea of still patching coreutils to omit leading 0 by default in
> %:::z and using 0 padding in %0:::z still has merit, if someone wants to
> write a patch.

I started to look at this but then noticed that by using %-:::z date(1)
actually already gives "+3" for me. However, since strftime(3) doesn't
recognize colon modifiers at all the situation in general is not much
better than before noticing this.

FWIW, the ultimate goal was to be able to write a libc locale file which
would print timezones when part of time/date strings like "UTC+3" or
"UTC+5.30" but the glibc RFE
(https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=12747) is pending on
the Austin Group RFE (http://austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=772) which
seems to be pending on further discussions, and perhaps coordination
with the C standard.

I still think that software should adapt to cultural conventions not the
other way around so although I won't be holding my breath I'll leave the
RFEs open and continue the discussion there as needed.

Thanks,

-- 
Marko Myllynen