Re: tweaking default `ls -l` output to use locale before posix

[Paul Eggert]

Mike Frysinger <address@hidden> writes:

> Gentoo has been using this patch too for 
> quite some time too ;)

Debian doesn't have the patch, and I suspect other distributions don't
either.  So we have a real split here.

At the very least, Mandrake and Gentoo's patch should not look at
POSIXLY_CORRECT, as this is not a POSIX-conformance issue.  If they
want to change the default, they should simply replace

    if (! (style = getenv ("TIME_STYLE")))
      style = "posix-long-iso";

with

    if (! (style = getenv ("TIME_STYLE")))
      style = "locale";

without looking at POSIXLY_CORRECT.  Could you please have this fixed
in the source?  (I suspect it's easy for you to fix this with Gentoo
at any rate....)


One possibility is to make this all easier to configure without
patching the source, e.g., with an

   #ifndef TIME_STYLE_DEFAULT
   # define TIME_STYLE_DEFAULT "posix-long-iso"
   #endif
   ...

    if (! (style = getenv ("TIME_STYLE")))
      style = TIME_STYLE_DEFAULT;

in the source code, and then let Mandrake and Gentoo configure with
the appropriate CPPFLAGS.


But before we go off the deep end here, why exactly is this change a
good idea?  If it's just a personal preference, then the TIME_STYLE
environment variable addresses the issue, no?  Perhaps Mandrake and/or
Gentoo could simply set TIME_STYLE=locale in their users' standard
startup files?