Collin Funk wrote: > As you mentioned, in Thailand the Gregorian calendar is used alongside > the Thai solar calendar (even if it is used less so in day-to-day life).
Yes, what does *not* matter, IMO, for the 'date' program is use in religious life (as opposed to official and everyday civil life). > And the Ethiopian calendar has been a cause for confusion as the world > becomes more globalized [2]. > [2] https://www.cnn.com/travel/ethiopian-unique-calendar-year As a reference about the Ethiopian calendar, you give me an article from U.S. media that says "Meanwhile, the Hebrew calendar is the official calendar of Israel." Which is a typical misrepresentations of facts. (I let everyone guess whether this is because it's a media outlet or because it's not from Israel.) The facts I get from Wikipedia are: - [1] "After the creation of the State of Israel, the Hebrew calendar became one of the official calendars of Israel, along with the Gregorian calendar." - [1] "Wall calendars commonly used in Israel are hybrids. Most are organised according to Gregorian rather than Jewish months, but begin in September, when the Jewish New Year usually falls, and provide the Jewish date in small characters." And ICU uses the Gregorian calendar in the Hebrew locale with the Gregorian month name (e.g. for today with "b' July"): Current date (full): יום רביעי, 16 ביולי 2025 Current date (long): 16 ביולי 2025 Current date: 16 ביולי 2025 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_calendar#In_contemporary_Israel > I assume this was part of the reason Saudi > Arabia moved to the Gregorian Calendar in 2016 Interesting. So, globalization via internet etc. tends to spread the use of the Gregorian calendar... > The date string formatting capabilities are intended for use in > Gregorian-style calendars, possibly with a different starting year > (or years). The %x and %c conversion specifications, however, are > intended for local representation; these may be based on a > different, non-Gregorian calendar. > > This is under APPLICATION USAGE, so not normative. But I think that most > people will assume that 'date' will return a Gregorian calendar date, > unless they explicitly use "%x" or "%c". OK, I will propose a coreutils 'date' documentation patch that explains the caveats with non-Gregorian calendars. > I think it would be good to support non-Gregorian calendars with those > format arguments, or a new option. But making it the default will just > require some users to remember to change their locale when posting the > output of 'date' in communication with foreigners (e.g. on a mailing > list). I disagree that it should be activated only by an option. It is the *default* calendar in everyday use in these countries. GNU/Linux is meant to be internationalized. For those cases where users want to force the Gregorian calendar, they may do so through the LC_TIME environment variable, e.g. LANG=fa_IR LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8 $ LANG=fa_IR src/date +'%Y-%m-%d' 1404-04-25 $ LANG=fa_IR LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8 src/date +'%Y-%m-%d' 2025-07-16 Bruno
