Bruno Haible <br...@clisp.org> writes: >> 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).
Agreed. Saudi Arabia still uses the Islamic Calendar for religious purposes, and I assume many other countries are similar. But that is not important to 'date'. >> 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 Right. I forgot about LC_TIME for some reason. If an Iranian commonly uses 'date' to talk with people on mailing lists used internationally, they can add "export LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8" to their profile. That resolves my uncertainty about the change, I think. Collin
