Re: glibc: standard date/time format patch

[Owen Taylor <otaylor at redhat dot com>]

Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes:

> Eduardo Pérez Ureta <eperez@it.uc3m.es> writes:
> 
> > Sure, POSIX says so. But POSIX should follow International Standards
> > instead American Standards.
> 
> > I don't want my system following Standards that only apply to America.
> 
> > POSIX should be corrected about that.
> 
> The appropriate time to ask vendors to change is after POSIX has been
> changed, I think.  It's better to comply with POSIX than to diverge from
> it even if the divergence seems to make more logical sense.
> 
> When you take up this issue with the POSIX working group, you'll discover
> that they had good reasons for standardizing the date format that they
> did, and also have some ideas about how to transition to more standard
> international dates (basically by having users use locales more than they
> do now).

And there are, in fact, numerous other ways that the C locale 
isn't fully functional; the two most obvious being:

 - The character set is ASCII. (So, many programs won't be
   able to display 'Eduardo Pérez Ureta'! :-)
 - strcol() uses a nonsensical ordering.

Regards,
                                        Owen