Alan J. Flavell wrote:
> I noticed that the yum cron task (cron.daily/yum.cron) is returning
> mail with the Subject: header containing a date such as "10/23/04".
>
> This is potentially ambiguous in an international context. Soon, this
> is going to read something like "03/04/05": who can say whether that
> means 4th March 2005 (USA vernacular), 3rd April 2005 (common European
> usage, modulo details of punctuation), or even 5th April 2003, without
> some additional data to help us?
>
> At risk of seeming pedantic, I'd like to put in a plea that any and
> all occurrences of ambiguous date formats should be replaced on sight
> with an unambiguous format.  I don't particularly care what format is
> used, ISO-ish or RFC-ish or whatever, but please let's at least make
> it unambiguous.  If it's needed as part of a filename, rather than
> merely for information, then e.g yyyy-mm-dd would be fine by me.
>
> For this specific instance, it appears that the harm is done here:
>
>         TODAY="$(date +%D)"
>
> and then this inappropriate format is used as $TODAY in a couple
> of places ("echo" and "/bin/mail -s") for information.
>
> Perhaps a hunt for the string '%D' in the source materials would be
> useful for locating other possible fixworthy spots...?
>
> best regards
Hi Alan,
The date is only used for the subject header so that users can sort and have
some sort of way of knowing when this mail was sent.
This is not a hard thing to change. As you pointed out, it's just a change in
what I set as date.

What do you and others feel it should be?

For my vote, I do not feel that changing it to yyyy-mm-dd is going to solve
the problem, because who's to know that it isn't yyyy-dd-mm.  So I'm in favor
of putting a month in there, somthing to the affect of
   dd MMM YYYY
such as 11 Feb 2004, or even 11-Feb-2004.  Maybe the dashes would be better
incase it did start getting used for a file.

Troy Dawson

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Troy Dawson  [log in to unmask]  (630)840-6468
Fermilab  ComputingDivision/CSS  CSI Group
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