Re: use of locale in "ls" again (Re: Japanese expression of date)

[Paul Eggert]

> Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 23:57:58 +0000
> From: Markus Kuhn <address@hidden>
> 
> I thought, the controversy was anyway only about the non-ISO MM-DD
> notation, not about the YY-MM-DD or YYYY-MM-DD ISO 8601 notations.

Yes, I think this is the core of the problem.  My impression is that
the MM-DD notation is what most bothers Bruno Haible.  Also, Tomohiro
Kubota (the other critic of the current 'ls' behavior) wrote that
YYYY-MM-DD was acceptable but MM-DD was NG.

Here's an idea.  How about if we change 'ls' to not use MM-DD?
Instead of the current behavior:

   $ ls -l .plan .profile today
   -r--r--r--    1 eggert   eggert        386 1981-07-14  .plan
   -r--r--r--    1 eggert   eggert       4012 11-20 11:03 .profile
   -rw-rw-r--    1 eggert   eggert          0 12-20 16:10 today

we would change 'ls' to use times for files modified within the last
24 hours, and dates for older files.  The basic idea is to use a 1-day
window, not the 6-month window of the POSIX locale.  So the posix-iso
output would look like this instead:

   $ ls -l .plan .profile today
   -r--r--r--    1 eggert   eggert        386 1981-07-14 .plan
   -r--r--r--    1 eggert   eggert       4012 2001-11-20 .profile
   -rw-rw-r--    1 eggert   eggert          0   16:10:01 today

This would conform better to ISO 8601, because it would avoid the
nonconforming "MM-DD" notation that bothers Mr. Haible and Mr. Kubota.
Also, it saves one precious print column.  I would like to hear
reactions to this idea.