From: Linus Torvalds Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 23:08:45 GMT Subject: Re: git's rev-parse.c function show_datestring presumes gnu date Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <86zmo6vnnj.fsf@blue.stonehenge.com> On Mon, 14 Nov 2005, Randal L. Schwartz wrote: > > 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