bug#35078: Possible bug in the date command, to do with %p

[Nicholas Joll]

Dear Assaf (and all)

> I'm making this as "not a bug", but discussion can continue by
replying to this thread.
> -assaf

Thank you Assaf for your lucid explanation and for your invitation to
discussion.

I imagine that this matter arises fairly frequently. For, the behaviour
here is not what one expects (at least not what the
less-than-fully-informed user expects).

One might think there is no real problem: though lowercase 'am'/'pm'
looks somewhat odd, and is not what the user expects when using '%P', it
is easy programmatically to convert lowercase to uppercase. Yet, some
people will use the program 'Conky' to display the time, and (to my
knowledge) Conky cannot do the string conversion.

I have two suggestions. (1) Amend the manual such that it says something
like the following.

    %P     like %p, but lower case (or uppercase if uppercase is all
that the locale provides)

(2) Add (and document) a new option that works thusly:

    %PP     locale's implementation of AM/PM (or blank if the locale has
no such implementation), forced into uppercase

1 is somewhat important. The conjunction of 1 and 2 would be ideal. Or
so it seems to me.

Nicholas