Re: date -I now undocumented

[Paul Eggert]

Dan Jacobson <address@hidden> writes:

> Well I don't suppose we will ever see the word "deprecated" in any of
> your Info or man pages,

No, actually we do see it.  For example, CVS coreutils.texi says that
cp --reply is deprecated and is scheduled to be removed in 2008.

> Contrast this with python, which even gives "future warnings".

We also do that with coreutils.  For example:

  $ export _POSIX2_VERSION=199209
  $ unset POSIXLY_CORRECT
  $ touch 0101000099 foo
  touch: warning: `touch 0101000099' is obsolete; use `touch -t 199901010000.00'
  $ ls -l 0101000099 foo
  ls: 0101000099: No such file or directory
  -rw-r--r-- 1 eggert eggert 0 Jan  1  1999 foo

(That 'touch' diagnostic is not documented.  There are limits to what
should be documented.)

The question is what is the right thing to do for 'date -I'.  Perhaps
we should improve coreutils, but simply documenting the current
behavior as-is is probably not an improvement.