Re: Improve on 'approxidate'

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Sat, Aug 22, 2009 at 03:10:07PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:

>  unsigned long approxidate(const char *date)
>  {
>  	int number = 0;
> @@ -881,21 +911,24 @@ unsigned long approxidate(const char *date)
>  	time_sec = tv.tv_sec;
>  	localtime_r(&time_sec, &tm);
>  	now = tm;
> +
> +	tm.tm_year = -1;
> +	tm.tm_mon = -1;
> +	tm.tm_mday = -1;

This breaks relative dates like "3.months.ago", because
approxidate_alpha needs to see the "current" date in tm (and now it sees
-1, subtracts from it, and assumes we are just crossing a year boundary
because of the negative).  3.years.ago is also broken, but I don't think
3.days.ago is.

Probably we just need to pass "now" to approxidate_alpha, and it needs
to call update_tm under the case for "months" and "years" (and I haven't
quite figured out why those are not part of the "tl" list).
Unfortunately, I'm out of time to look at it more right now, but I'll
take a look tonight or tomorrow if you don't beat me to it.

-Peff