Hi Collin, > and then Paul added: > > > Emacs has had the tradition of using UTC for ChangeLog dates, so > > please support that as well, as an option.
and Simon did that, through documentation: In <https://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/html_node/gitlog_002dto_002dchangelog.html> he added the middle snippet with env LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 TZ=UTC=0 (Btw, is UTC=0 correct? I thought it should be UTC0, per <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2024-06/msg00214.html> ?) > I've attached a patch that I think deals with these issues. Can you all > look over it for me? > > The patch adds a new '--utc' option and changes the default behavior so > that localtime is no longer used. Both changes are bad. * To achieve the UTC display, Simon already showed how to do it: Set the environment variable TZ to UTC0. If a feature can be achieved by setting an environment variable, it's overkill to add a command-line option that does the same thing. * It drops the localtime() call, with two bad effects: - The principle "Dates and times are always shown relative to the user's time zone, unless stated otherwise" is violated. This principle exists because most users don't want to deal with time zones. If you have a meeting with me at 15:00 GMT, it is *mandatory* that my calendar displays it to me as 17:00 - and your calendar as 08:00. "Unless stated otherwise" means, for example, "26 July 2024, 9:00 Saipan time". - The dates come out unordered. See: $ build-aux/gitlog-to-changelog --since=2024-01-01 | grep ^2024 ... 2024-06-29 Bruno Haible <br...@clisp.org> 2024-06-28 Collin Funk <collin.fu...@gmail.com> 2024-06-29 Bruno Haible <br...@clisp.org> ... 2024-06-26 Paul Eggert <egg...@cs.ucla.edu> 2024-06-25 Collin Funk <collin.fu...@gmail.com> 2024-06-26 Bruno Haible <br...@clisp.org> ... Bruno
