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 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
