Subject: Re: Bug report: Author/Commit date in ISO 8601 format

From: Jeff King <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2014 09:06:10 -0400

On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 09:29:44AM +0200, Oliver Busch wrote:

> I encountered the following problem: When using the date formatting option
> ISO (either by setting --date=iso or using format:%ci for the committer
> date), the output is formatted like this:
> 
> 2014-08-25 17:49:43 +0200
> 
> But according to ISO 8601, should be formatted like this (see
> http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime):
> 
> 2014-08-25T17:49:43+02:00

Yeah, it is not strictly ISO but more ISO-like (to further add
confusion, it is mostly RFC3339, which claims to be a "profile of
ISO8601". But we don't follow the timezone conventions there. Yeesh).

Interestingly, this actually came up when the feature was added:

  http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/52414/focus=52585

but there was some discussion of ISO8601's weird phrasing of "T" being
optional.

> I therefore suggest to adapt the output when using --date=iso or
> format:%ci to comply 100% with the ISO 8601 specs, or at least change
> documentation to say the output is only "ISO-like".

I think changing the output at this point would cause backwards
compatibility problems (not to mention that it's a lot less readable for
humans).

Patches welcome for a documentation update. I also think something like
--date=iso8601-strict might make sense for the case of feeding the
result to another parser.

-Peff