Subject: Re: [RESOLVED NOTABUG] "git commit --date" format parsing

From: Bastien Traverse <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 24 May 2015 01:24:03 +0200

Le 23/05/2015 00:06, Jeff King a écrit :
> OK, this is weird. When I tried to reproduce, I couldn't. But I had
> typed in the date string myself while reading your email in another
> window.  And though I was sure that I had typed it correctly, just to be
> double-plus-sure I copied and pasted your string. And it failed!
> 
> The date string in your email looks like this (using cut and paste):
> 
>   $ echo 2015-05-21T16∶31+02:00 | xxd
>   00000000: 3230 3135 2d30 352d 3231 5431 36e2 88b6  2015-05-21T16...
>   00000010: 3331 2b30 323a 3030 0a                   31+02:00.
> 
> Your "colon" is actually UTF-8 for code point 	. So git's
> date parser does not recognize it, and punts to approxidate(), which
> does all manner of crazy guessing trying to figure out what you meant.

Okay, this is crazy. Now I can't reproduce it myself either: I just
repeated the procedure and date parsing works as expected. The only
difference with my last email is that I upgraded and rebooted my system
(there was a kernel update for 4.0.4 on Arch... Among other things). I
guess that would have reset my keyboard layout, but I swear I tested it
multiple times over a few days before posting here.

Anyway, thanks for your insight I would have never figured this myself.
I'll be wary of silent unicode character substitution :)

Just for the record:
$ localectl
   System Locale: LANG=fr_FR.UTF8
       VC Keymap: fr
      X11 Layout: fr
     X11 Variant: oss

And I am using the default monospace font in gnome-terminal and gedit.
Pretty basic stuff, really.

Thanks again,
Bastien