Subject: Re: bug#11101: Incorrect relative dates the day after DST switchover

From: Eric Blake <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2012 11:38:39 -0600

On 03/27/2012 11:34 AM, [email-masked] wrote:
> Well, if one assumes the point of allowing 'human-friendly' relative dates
> such as 'yesterday' is to make usage more intuitive, then the
> 24-hour-offset is probably incorrect behavior.  That would explain the
> quantity of bug reports you are seeing.
> 
> Perhaps the 'yesterday' directive ought to just go ahead and assume the
> recommended noon reference point, rather than the current moment?  That
> would certainly reflect the general meaning of the term 'yesterday' more
> accurately.
> 
> It seems odd to explicitly permit a natural-language term and then use a
> definition for it that differs from what a natural-language user probably
> means.

You are welcome to submit a patch to gnulib to change getdate.y, and to
coreutils to document your desired improved semantic change to relative
date computations.  It's just that it is such a complex patch, and the
fact that we have a documented workaround, that no one has been bothered
enough to submit a patch so far.

-- 
Eric Blake   [email-masked]    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org