Hello,
On Thu, Dec 12, 2019 at 6:57 PM za3k--- via GNU coreutils General Discussion <[email protected]> wrote: > > I am interested in adding support for decimal time to 'date', but before > I dive into writing a patch, I wanted to ask whether the patch has a > chance of being accepted--this may just be too obscure. Thank you for the suggestion and for checking in first - that's an excellent approach. > In decimal time, 2019-12-12.75 would represent 2019-12-12T18:00:00. > Decimal time in the modern era is mainly used in timekeeping (to track > employee or contracting hours) and in scientific recording (to make > drawing graphs easy). Astronomers use another form of decimal time on > their own calendar and would not be supported. This is an interesting idea, certainly worth discussing. When such format is used by time-keepers or scientific recording, is it being used on the command-line or from a shell script? or is this more commonly done in a higher-level programming language? Can you expand on the other format used by Astronomers? --- Before going further, please be aware that in order for such patch to be accepted (or even evaluated), we'll need a copyright assignment from you (and, potentially, from your employer or university, if you implement it as part of work/school project). To learn more, please see here: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.en.html To start the process, please fill the following form and send it to [email protected] : https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/tree/doc/Copyright/request-assign.future (for the program/package question, please fill both "coreutils" and "gnulib") --- On the technical side, I expect such a patch to modify mainly gnulib's nstrftime.c module: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/tree/lib/nstrftime.c If we consider adding a new letter operator (e.g. "%X" ) we should make sure it does not conflate with any existing letters, including on non-gnu implementations (e.g. on BSDs). regards, - assaf
