Re: ls default time style

[Markus Kuhn]

Bruno Haible wrote on 2001-12-11 13:42 UTC:
> What I'm asking for is that this info be taken
> into account by default and not overridden by a US centric notation.

That was not a fair comment. It is certainly not a US-centric notation,
it is just one truncated variant of the modern German and international
notation, a perfectly practical one I might add.

Big-endian date notation has a long tradition in East Asian countries,
by the way, it is certainly not just an invention of ISO or something
related to US practice.

US centric are only mid-endian "month day year" date notations, where a
year follows a bigendian "month day" pair, and I really don't see anyone
advocating that in GNU systems, apart from where it is required for
compatibility/conformance for historic reasons (namely ctime).

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

Where column space is a limited resource and the century is obvious (and
anyway easily available via stat!), two-digit years are certainly
perfectly acceptable. I do prefer 4-digit years where the space for them
is available, but "ls" is obviously not one of these places. Nothing
strange here at all, just proper, pragmatic and well-explained
engineering, I'd hope. (I'd even be tempted to drop the "-:" separators,
but I suspect the majority of users would find that definitley more
difficult to read and recognize, and this separator-free ISO 8601
"basic" notation is also not covered by German typographic standards,
whereas the 2-digit year is.)

Markus

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