[Quilt-dev] Re: remove GNU date dependency [Was: quilt mail broken with sed 3.02]

[Andreas Gruenbacher]

On Tuesday 31 January 2006 12:48, Gary V. Vaughan wrote:
> Salut Jean,
>
> Jean Delvare wrote:
> >> Also, I don't know how to produce a RFC822 timestamp with POSIX date; no
> >> idea how to produce a timezone offset (e.g., +0100, -0600):
> >>
> >> $ date --rfc-822
> >> Mon, 30 Jan 2006 23:52:43 +0100
> >> $ date '+%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S xxxxx'
> >> Mon, 30 Jan 2006 23:52:44 xxxxx
> >
> > There's %z according to the man page, but it's said to be a nonstandard
> > extension, so I guess that it won't be there unless --rfc-2822 is there
> > too :( No other idea ATM.
>
> Since quilt relies on perl already, we could still remove the dependency on
> GNU date with:
>
>   @PERL@ -e '
>     use POSIX qw(strftime);
>     print strftime("%z", localtime(time()));'
>
> The invocation with --utc is only for the msgid, so I can't see any harm in
> removing it, and maybe having some machines generate msgids in local time.

That change is fine with me.

> Patch attached.

What I don't quite like is that when the user changes the Date: header by 
hand, Quilt will no longer base the other timestamps on that. I think it's 
helpful to keep the timestamps close together so that mailers will better be 
able to group those emails together.

> Alternatively, I suppose a compat/getopt.in style perl script replacement
> for date could be written that can handle the --utc and --rfc-822 options
> so that systems with GNU date could continue to use it...

I would prefer that.

Thanks,
Andreas.