Re: [PATCH] man*/: ffix

[Alejandro Colomar <alx.manpages@gmail.com>]

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Hi Lennart, Branden, and Guillem,

On 4/18/23 19:32, Lennart Jablonka wrote:
> Quoth Alejandro Colomar:
>>>> What do standards say about formatting dates?
>>>
>>> Nothing that I know of.
>>>
>>>> Do they specify the character?
>>>
>>> Not that I know of.
> 
> ISO 8601:2004 (not the newest revision, but the one I found), the 
> standard defining the YYYY‐MM‐DD explicitly calls for a “hyphen,” 
> stating additionally:
> 
>> In an environment where use is made of a character repertoire based on 
>> ISO/IEC 646, “hyphen” and “minus” are both mapped onto “hyphen-minus”.
> 
> This is not the case here.  A hyphen is the character to use; that is, 
> an unescaped hyphen-minus in the input.

Agreed.  Let's use hyphen for dates.  :)

Thanks for checking ISO!

[...]

>>>> However, date(1) only accepts hyphen-minus, so it would be nice to use
>>>> a compatible format, even if standards didn't mandate it.
> 
> The standard mandates a hyphen.  A hyphen-minus is to be used where the 
> date is to be interpreted as a string to be given to \fIdate\fP.

[...]

>> I'm not convinced, because dates are not prose.  Why should we use hyphens
>> in dates formatted with standards-like formats?  I would agree in using
>> hyphens in dates if we spelled out dates unformatted, in plain English.
>> But if we use ISO-like or RFC-like formats, I think we should adhere to
>> them completely.
> 
> Great!  Exactly my opinion.  An RFC usually tells you to use ASCII, so 
> we should do that where applicable.  Luckily, we aren’t concerned with 
> RFCs here, but with ISO 8601.
> 

Guillem, I'll apply your existing patch, and will remove manually the bits
about hyphen-minus.  You don't need to resend.

If you know about places where the man pages use hyphen-minus in dates and
would like to send a patch to remove the escape (so to produce a hyphen),
I'd appreciate that.

Cheers,
Alex

-- 
<http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>
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