Strange CVS update date format 'P'

[Mark E. Hamilton]

I just had a developer come to me with a very strange problem. All of 
the files in his sandbox had been checked out from the date 
'D2008.01.16.07.00.00', and he had not done that. After investigating we 
determined that he had intended to check out any new directories and 
prune empties, so he used the (incorrect) command

cvs update -DP

instead of using the option '-dP'

Since the '-D' option sets the update date, this passed the date string 
'P' to CVS. I assumed the date 'P' would have been invalid, but I tried 
it with raw cvs and it took it. (In fact, 'cvs update -D <date>' will 
accept any single upper case character except 'J' for the date string.)

Is this one of those "intentionally not documented here" date formats 
the manual talks about, or are these just some odd truncated ISO8601 
date formats?

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Mark E. Hamilton
Orion International Technologies, Inc.
Sandia National Laboratory, NM.
505-844-7666