[cvsnt] $Date$ format in cvsnt?

[David Somers]

Tony Hoyle wrote:
>> I always wondered why CVS[NT] never used the ISO8601 format... seems
>> crazy not to use a standard. Tony, how about having an option to
>> return dates in this format?
> 
> It's ctime format... it's a fixed format because it's only ever
> transmitted as text and compared in the entries files etc.

I guess the answer to myself is that using ctime requires almost no effort,
whereas getting 8061 format date/time requires mucking around with
strftime.

> If it was 
> changed it would break existing sandboxes (in fact the windows ctime is
> slightly incompatible so we have to modify it on Win32 to be the same as
> the unix one).

Sure.

If I was going to change the date format, I'd only change it in keyword
substitutions (e.g. $Date$, $Id$, etc.)... would probably be nice to have
it in cvs log too, but I suspect too many apps that parse the format
directly would break if anything changes.

> The triggers are already passed the preformatted string since the
> original isn't available, so it'd be a fairly big change to try to
> modify that for them.  OTOH you can run it through Date::Parse in a perl
> script and convert it to anything you like.

Or awk :-) Yeah, I use awk, and I'm not afraid to admit it.

-- 
David Somers