Re: Use of strftime in movemail.ec

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Cc: address@hidden
> From: Paul Eggert <address@hidden>
> Date: Sat, 5 Mar 2016 11:39:07 -0800
> 
> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > I believe these format specifiers were used under the assumption that
> > Gnulib's strftime will be used on systems that don't support the full
> > functionality.
> 
> No, I merely assumed C99, which specifies the %e and %T format specifiers for 
> strftime. I didn't know Microsoft lacks support for this. I didn't think 
> Gnulib 
> would be needed.

I see.

> Using %d instead of %e changes the output format of movemail slightly, by 
> using 
> leading 0 rather than leading space for day of month. It's more conservative 
> to 
> stick with the same format, so I installed a further patch to try to do that. 
> I 
> can't easily test this further patch on Windows, but it clearly restores the 
> old 
> behavior elsewhere because now all the changes are inside "#ifdef WINDOWSNT".

This change causes us have 2 slightly different format specifiers,
which subtly depend on each other for correct operation.  Wouldn't it
be better to pass the format string to movemail_strftime, and replace
%e and %T there?  Or maybe use %H:%M:%S instead of %T (it's just a
shorthand, right?)?  I'm a little bit nervous about having the format
duplicated.

> Using Gnulib would be another possibility, but would be more intrusive for 
> other 
> reasons (we'd have to supply replacement implementations of emacs_getenv_TZ 
> and 
> emacs_setenv_TZ on all platforms), and I'd rather not do that so close to a 
> release.

I agree.

Thanks.