Re: Date parsing

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Jun 21, 2008, 22:37 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.1.10.0806211530560.2926@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.1.10.0806211507370.2926@woody.linux-foundation.org>

On Sat, 21 Jun 2008, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> 
> Remember: the git date handling was _not_ meant to be a generic date 
> library. It is very much meant to be a *git* date library.

Btw, I'm not proud of that. The whole of "date.c" was a huge hack to overcome the fact that

 - standard library date parsing is pure and utter shit, even for standard 
   date formats.

 - Never mind the standard date formats, very few seem to do the relative 
   dateslike "10 days ago".

 - So I couldn't find anybody elses code to "borrow" that did a reasonable 
   job and handled the nice relative dates too.

The GNU "date" command has pretty good support for doing things like "5 minutes ago", but I think I tried to look at the code, and quicky decided that it was not an option (when I say "I think I tried", I have to admit that I don't have strong memories from it, but I suspect it was all so utterly horrid that I repressed the episode).

I don't mind using other peoples code (the whole xdiff library and the SHA1 stuff was certainly all from outside), but it needs to be in a format that doesn't cause projectile vomiting.

If somebody has a good date parser, I think we could drop the git-specific one in an instant.

Or if somebody wants to just improve on it... Hint, hint.

		Linus