date parsing of european dates

[Nic Ferrier]

Sorry to ask 2 simple questions in as many days... but I believe I
have found another problem with GNU date.


Assertions:

GNU date does not allow the date parsing pattern to be specified on
the command line.

Neither does it allow use of the DATEMSK env var to hack the behaviour
of the internal call to the C library's getdate().

Neither does it change the parsing of dates based on the environment
locale variables, eg: LC_TIME


Thus:

   $  LC_TIME=en_GB.utf8 date --date "12/05/2005"
   Mon Dec  5 00:00:00 GMT 2005

but what it should really output is:

  Thu May 5 00:00:00 BST 2005


Are my assertions incorrect or is it indeed impossible to parse this
date with the semantics that I want?



Nic Ferrier