[bug #23767] ISO-8601 and "date"

[anonymous]

URL:
  <http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?23767>

                 Summary: ISO-8601 and "date"
                 Project: GNU Core Utilities
            Submitted by: None
            Submitted on: Friday 07/04/2008 at 22:11 UTC
                Category: None
                Severity: 3 - Normal
              Item Group: None
                  Status: None
                 Privacy: Public
             Assigned to: None
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any

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Details:

Sorry if I'm being dense, this seems to be an issue that comes up with some
regularity.

The ISO 8601 format for date/time specifications is well-known;  in
particular, it is described reasonably fully on wikipedia at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601.  RFC 2822 and RFC 3339, by contrast, do
not even have Wikipedia articles, not even stubs.

It is also, I admit, the only reasonably compact format for specifying a
time/date format that I know of.  "20080704T215923Z" is still somewhat
human-readable, unlikely to be mistaken for a local time because the "T" and
"Z" are exotic enough to stop people just making assumptions about how to
interpret the string, the format allows alphabetic sorting ...

In short, I don't see what's wrong with it and I'm interminably confused by
the fact that it's not date's default format.  But it isn't even supported as
an input format for -d!  There is an --iso-8601 option, but it's
undocumented!

What's up with this?  Is it some sort of politically motivated campaign?  If
there actually were any harm in understanding, at least, the week-number-free
"T"-separated date/time string with a "Z" suffix, shouldn't that at least be
documented somewhere?




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