Re: Dired doesn't understand localized file dates

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

   It turns out to be very very difficult to make Dired properly handle
   all the kinds of dates that it can encounter.  A few years ago I
   concluded it was ill-advised to make further changes, because changes
   here had a tendency to fix some cases and break others.  What makes it
   so hard is the need to detect the dates *and* handle file names with
   spaces in them.

the way to do this generally would be to create a temporary file (w/ known
name, excluding spaces, and mtime), capture its ls(1) output, and figure out
parse hints for use by dired (learn-by-example).  this would have to be done
at least once per session.  maintenance then becomes the accumulation of
patterns into the table consulted by the "figure-it-out" engine.

(blue-sky-mode: generalizing this a bit further allows for real-time mail
virus scanning, for example, presuming the virus db format is open...)

thi