Re: [Monotone-devel] Notes on time and date handling

[William Uther]

On 04/03/2007, at 6:21 PM, Zack Weinberg wrote:

> As I mentioned this morning, I have replaced all our uses of
> boost::date_time with bespoke logic; in the process I got to take a
> good hard look at what we do with dates and why.

[snip]

> The other thing I think we should consider changing is date *output*.
> We currently take those ISO 8601 strings straight from the date certs
> and splat them into log output (or whatever).  It might make sense to
> convert them to local time and/or to the user's locale's date format.
> This would not be hard to implement.

I wanted to look into this.  Was there a process you had in mind to  
convert the times?

You could do something like (and this is unchecked, untested, "typed  
directly into a mail program" code):

#include <ctime>

char *UTC_time_str_from_cert;
struct tm utc_tm;
time_t time;
char buf[30];

strptime(UTC_time_str_from_cert, "%FT%T", & utc_tm);
time = timegm(&utc_tm);
ctime_r(&time, buf);

But I don't know how reasonable that is from an i18l viewpoint (I've  
not done a huge amount of date handling before, and none in C++).   
Any suggested improvements?

Cheers,

Will           :-}