| < Catching up | Russ Allbery > Eagle's Path > December 2005 | Bookstore sale haul > |
Aren't surprises fun. Apparently at some point CVS changed the format of dates in Id keyword expansion from using slashes to using dashes. Now, I don't object to this change in general. Dashes are the international standard after all. However, didn't anyone think that, er, maybe someone might be parsing that data?
Also, I'm pretty sure that this happened in 1:1.12.9-17 in Debian, but observe the complete lack of a changelog mention. Maybe it's accidental? Maybe it's Debian-specific? Who knows?
Maybe this behavior will disappear again. Hard to tell. But anyway, I've released new versions of faq2html and spin that can deal with both slashes and dashes, and now I'm going to go back to not thinking about this.
You can get the latest versions from my web tools distribution page.
Posted: 2005-12-11 17:47 — Why no comments?
Pretty sure it's not a locale issue, since I explicitly set LC_ALL to C and never otherwise set any sort of locale variables. I could be wrong, though; I'll double-check when I next log in via ssh. Maybe something is importing a locale setting from somewhere.
And yeah, Date::Parse is nice, but in this case just changing some regexes was all I had to do. Well, except in the one affected Python script, which is using strptime and needed to catch an exception and try another format.
Posted by eagle at 2005-12-12 18:33
| < Catching up | Russ Allbery > Eagle's Path > December 2005 | Bookstore sale haul > |
Perhaps CVS didn't change but your LC_TIME or other locale environment variables have changed? In any case, perl's Date::Parse module is *great* for deciphering random date/time formats.
Posted by James Lick at 2005-12-12 06:05