Re: CVS update: MODIFIED: src ...

[Larry Jones]

Derek Robert Price writes:
> 
> You could argue for February 28th (or 29th in a leap year), for that 
> matter.  End of October + 100 months = end of February.

Indeed.

> What about setting errno in getdate.y and setting a string to the 
> unparsable date or more likely setting a global error string to a 
> complete error message including the invalid date.  I think "Date/time 
> resolves to non-existant date: Feb. 30, 2004" is much more user-friendly 
> than "Can't parse date/time: 100 months", which is almost the same error 
> message I'd get if I asked CVS to parse "asdfkhjgfadlhglfj" as a date.

I'm not sure it's worth it, I don't recall anyone ever being confused by
an unparsable date/time (other than ones caused by Y2K bugs).  Note that
getdate() is, at least in theory, a common (shared) library routine -- I
believe the version we have was lifted from GNU tar -- so we may not
want to change it, although I believe the current implementation (at
least what's in glibc) has deviated quite substantially from the
historical implementation.  The Single Unix Specification requires a
templatized version that doesn't seem to accept relative times at all.

There are some relevant comments in the texinfo source for the CVS
manual in the description of the -D option starting around line 7960
that are worth reading.

-Larry Jones

I'm crying because out there he's gone, but he's not gone inside me. -- Calvin