Re: ls default time style

[Bruno Haible]

Markus Kuhn writes:

> Admittedly, the "12-03" does not even conform strictly to ISO 8601:2000,

Maybe this can convince Paul Eggert, but it is a minor point.

The important point is that there are four commonly ways to present
a date without year in Germany:

    3. Dezember
    3. Dez.
    3. Dez
    3.12.

and "12-03" is not one of them.

Which one among them to choose, is a discussion we can have on the
German localization mailing list, which is responsible for the
fileutils/de.po file. What I'm asking for is that this info be taken
into account by default and not overridden by a US centric notation.

> Could the date field to occupy 14 characters? In that case, I would
> advocate the format "YY-MM-DD HH:MM" to be used everywhere.

You have been promoting ISO 8601 with 4-digit year numbers, and now
you advocate the contrary? Strange.

> Internationalization merely means to enable programs to be useful in
> many countries. Localization is one way of achieving that, namely to
> modify the bahaviour of programs to follow historically grown national
> conventions. Standardization is an alternative, namely to find
> conventions that are acceptable in many if not all countries. I advocate
> the school of thought that standardization is in any respect far
> superiour to localization.

Do you mean, standardize the way people can localize their
applications, or standardize the applications to produce locale
independent output? The former I agree, the latter I disagree.

Bruno