Re: ls default time style

[Markus Kuhn]

> From: Bruno Haible <address@hidden>
> Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2001 14:16:50 +0100 (CET)

> Starting with fileutils-4.1.1, "ls -l" in a German locale produces output
> like this:...
> 
> -rw-r--r--    1 bin     bin      2188323 12-03 00:00 fileutils-4.1.3.tar.gz
> -rw-r--r--    1 bin     bin      1812537 2001-04-29  fileutils-4.1.tar.gz
> 
> This date format HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN in Germany and is totally
> unintelligible to any user.

Go into a nearby bookshop. Look into "DUDEN - Die deutsche
Rechtschreibung" (21. Auflage, Dudenverlag, Mannheim, 1996, ISBN
3-411-04011-4), the commonly respected authority in matters of not only
German orthography but also German basic typographic conventions. Open
page 76 (Hinweise für das Maschinenschreiben, Datum [hints for
typewriter usage, dates]), which is besides the equivalent German
standard DIN 5008 the most authoritative reference for how to write
German dates with typewriters. You will see, that it lists both the old
little-endian dotted all-numeric format (24.08.1998) as well as the
modern international standard form (1998-08-24).

It is what students have been learning in typewriter and text processing
courses in the non-academic forms of German secondary education for
almost half a decade. Your statement "has never been seen in Germany and
is totally unintelligible for the user" was a good approximation for the
situation in 1990, but the ISO date notation is taught at schools today
and I see it's use spreading reasonably rapidly in German web pages and
business correspondence. In the end, it is a generation thing, just like
the metric system is in the UK. Everyone under 40 uses it exclusively,
but only few non-technical people above that age, thanks to the school
curriculum change in the mid 1960s. Such conventions take up to 50 years
to become ubiquitous.

I welcome the use of the ISO 8601 notation in "ls", as I find dates much
easier to compare if they are written all-numeric and bigendian. GNU tar
has done that for quite some time. It also leads the way towards
reducing the differences between locales, and the standardized "POSIX"
locale date notation is rather unfortunate for people who try to search
manually in the printout for the oldest or newest date.

In addition, the ISO 8601 date/time notation is now also well familiar
to most Linux beginners, as it has been used by the KDE desktop to show
date and time in the bottom-left corner for quite some time.

See also

  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html

which says

    In May 1996, the German standard DIN 5008, which specifies typographical
    rules for German texts written on typewriters, was updated. The old
    German numeric date notations DD.MM.YYYY and DD.MM.YY have been replaced by
    the ISO date notations YYYY-MM-DD and YY-MM-DD. Similarly, the old German
    time notations hh.mm and hh.mm.ss have been replaced by the ISO notations
    hh:mm and hh:mm:ss. Those new notations are now also mentioned in the
    latest edition of the Duden. The German alphanumeric date notation
    continues to be for example "3. August 1994" or "3. Aug. 1994". The
    corresponding Austrian standard has already used the ISO 8601 date and time
    notations before.

    ISO 8601 has been adopted as European Standard EN 28601 and is therefore
    now a valid standard in all EU countries and all conflicting national
    standards have been changed accordingly.

Cheers,

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>