F20 System Wide Change: No Default Syslog

Lennart Poettering mzerqung at 0pointer.de
Tue Jul 16 11:54:34 UTC 2013


On Tue, 16.07.13 11:49, Nicolas Mailhot (nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net) wrote:

> 
> Le Lun 15 juillet 2013 20:09, Till Maas a écrit :
> >  Also it is sad that journalctl does not directly accept ISO 8601
> > time specifications (I can open a bug if there is a changes it will be
> > implemented).
> 
> +100 not using iso 8601 by default nowadays is insane, I've been
> slowly

Thanks for calling me insane.

> moving all the bits I could to iso 8601 in the past years and it's the
> same breath of fresh air as UTF-8 was compared to the legacy
> all-incompatible-with-each-other 8 bit encodings

We looked into using ISO dates, especially for denoting repetition
events, but quite frankly they are just not simple and intuitive to
write. Expressions such as "P1Y2M10DT2H30M/2008-05-11T15:30:00Z" are not
nice to write, nor even to read. 

I think the ISO dates are great for serializing timestamp and calendar
events to ASCII strings for being parsed again by computers, but they
just suck as user interface.

The reason it took so long for systemd to gain support for calendar
events was primarily because this question is so messy. We wanted to
stick to a standardised language for date, but quite frankly there was
none that was convincing as user interface.

You might have noticed that most graphical programs (such as email
programs) that want to show you a time will not do so in the ISO format
either, but in a more local, user friendly presentation. That's because
the ISO format is just not suitable for user presentation.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.


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