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From: | Ian Abbott |
Subject: | Re: [bug-gnulib] problem with getdate |
Date: | Tue, 12 Apr 2005 10:18:43 +0100 |
User-agent: | Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 (X11/20050118) |
On 12/04/05 08:24, Paul Eggert wrote:
Derek Price <address@hidden> writes:If I pass these times in as "EDT" (Eastern Daylight Time), then they work. Ian mentioned doing something similar with "BST" (British Summer Time) in a separate email. Is this an intentional failure?No, it's not. I installed this fix into gnulib. Thanks for reporting it. 2005-04-12 Paul Eggert <address@hidden> * getdate.y (universal_time_zone_table): New constant. (time_zone_table): Remove GMT, UT, UTC entries; they're now in universal_time_zone_table. (lookup_zone): Prefer universal_time_zone_table to local_time_zone_table, so that "GMT" time stamps are allowed in London during the summer. Problem reported by Ian Abbott.
I realize GMT is something of a special case, since it is both a local timezone in the UK and a universal timezone (historically as a predecessor of UTC and currently in certain applications). However, in the general case, should the validity of a timespec depend on the local timezone in effect when running the code? Going back to the "EST" (Eastern Standard Time) example, the validity of dates that fall within the daylight savings period varies according to the local timezone:
$ TZ=Europe/London ./getdate Enter date, or blank line to exit. > 2005-5-1 EST 2005-05-01 06:00:00.000000000 > $ $ TZ=America/New_York ./getdate Enter date, or blank line to exit. > 2005-5-1 EST Bad format - couldn't convert. > $ $The timespec "2005-5-1 EST" is not valid if EST time periods and EDT time periods should be considered mutually exclusive (except when they overlap at the end of EDT). But I don't think the validity should depend on the local timezone and a forgiving implementation should probably allow "2005-5-1 EST" regardless of whether EST or EDT is in effect.
-- -=( Ian Abbott @ MEV Ltd. E-mail: <address@hidden> )=- -=( Tel: +44 (0)161 477 1898 FAX: +44 (0)161 718 3587 )=-
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