bug#53396: 27.1; icalendar rendering should include timezone

[Antoine Beaupré]

On 2022-06-08 05:37:03, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> Resent-From: Stefan Kangas <stefan@marxist.se>
>> Original-Sender: "Debbugs-submit" <debbugs-submit-bounces@debbugs.gnu.org>
>> Resent-CC: bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
>> Resent-Sender: help-debbugs@gnu.org
>> Cc: 53396@debbugs.gnu.org
>> From: Stefan Kangas <stefan@marxist.se>
>> Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2022 17:04:10 -0500
>> 
>> Antoine Beaupré <anarcat@debian.org> writes:
>> 
>> >  1. the default date format is American. I understand Americans first
>> >     built Emacs, but its use has largely spread outside of the United
>> >     States of America which has another, standard, time format called
>> >     ISO 8601. workaround: (setq calendar-date-style 'iso)
>> 
>> Why not change the `calendar-date-style' default to `iso'?
>> 
>> It seems overly US-centric to prefer `american' when most of the rest of
>> the world does not use that particular style.
>
> IMNSHO, 'iso' is a bad default because no one uses it.

That's a strange comment after one user telling you explicitly that they
use it.

How big is that "no one" group in your mind anyways? It's at least one,
I suspect it's more.

It's even more bizarre to state that the actual ISO 8601 standard is
used by "no one" considering it's, well, an ISO standard. According to
Wikipedia:

    On the Internet, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) uses the IETF
    standard based on ISO 8601 in defining a profile of the standard
    that restricts the supported date and time formats to reduce the
    chance of error and the complexity of software.

Also:

   The ISO 8601 week date, as of 2006, appeared in its basic form on
   major brand commercial packaging in the United States.

The article goes on documenting 42 different countries, including the
United States of America, which have formally adopted ISO 8601 as a
national standard (ANSI INCITS 30-1997 (R2008) and NIST FIPS PUB 4-2,
specifically, in the US).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Usage

So, really, "no one uses it"? Come on.

> If we don't want to be "US-centric", we should determine the default
> from the user's locale.

I'm fine with that too, but I would point out that you already have a
lot of people in the US that are pretty tired with the ridiculous locale
en_US has adopted. But maybe that debate is better left to the locale
settings and not here.

I would also argue that switching to the user's locale is harder to do
than just change the default to something that everyone will
unambiguously understand, even, yes, US people that are hell bent on not
adopting that standard.

The point I was trying to make is the default is unreasonable, and that
ISO would be a better default. But maybe that's too tough of a pill to
swallow, still, after 30 years of ISO 8601 and even more decades of
trying to internationalise software.

a.