[Fedora-packaging] time of day in RPM changelogs

[Björn Persson]

In a package review I came across a changelog entry in this format:

* Thu Jul 25 12:24:56 CEST 2019 Name <nn(a)example.com&gt; - 0.1.0-1

RPM appears to be able to parse that, but the time of day and the
timezone code aren't in the format prescribed by the Packaging
Guidelines. On the other hand it's not clear that the policy is meant
to explicitly forbid such precise timestamps, as it seems mostly
concerned with the placement of the version and release:

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/packaging-guidelines/#changelogs

Does the policy need to be updated to allow a time of day and a timezone
code? Or does it need to be clarified to clearly forbid them?

Ideally the date/time format variants that RPM accepts should be
documented somewhere – in a spec file syntax specification perhaps – and
the guidelines should point to that specification.

Björn Persson