Re: git's rev-parse.c function show_datestring presumes gnu date

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Nov 14, 2005, 23:08 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0511141504530.3263@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <86zmo6vnnj.fsf@blue.stonehenge.com>

On Mon, 14 Nov 2005, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> 
> git-rev-parse calls GNU date externally for --since, --after, --before,
> and --until, which will fail on at least OpenBSD and Mac OSX (Darwin).
> 
> At a minimum, this code can be commented out on such platforms.  Better
> would be to have some sort of suitable replacement.

I really wanted to do the date parsing myself, rather than call out to date, but I got lazy.

It shouldn't be all that difficult to do some trivial cases (gnu date handles totally insane things, we could easily do with just a simpler thing).

Anybody want to handle
 - partial real dates ("August 5th" - figure out the year automatically, 
   and notice that it might be _last_ year since the date only makes 
   sense if it's in the past)
 - relative dates ("5 days ago", "yesterday", "one week ago")

It shouldn't be that hard, and if you do _not_ touch the date.c functions (which have to be totally dependable) you can be pretty damn lazy and lax and just guess a lot.

		Linus