Re: Cygwin strptime() is missing "%s" which strftime() has

[Brian Inglis <Brian dot Inglis at SystematicSw dot ab dot ca>]

On 2017-07-24 15:48, Eric Blake wrote:
> On 07/24/2017 04:28 PM, Lavrentiev, Anton (NIH/NLM/NCBI) [C] wrote:
>>> then its use of %s in either of those functions constitutes a _bug_
>>
>> Oh really?  Is that why "%s" was added to Cygwin's strftime() lately?
> 
> Your mailer is breaking up threads, which is making it very annoying to
> follow where your replies are landing.
> 
> strftime() has been formatting %s since Oct 2015 (if you can call that
> "lately").  In fact, you made me check git history: it was not me that
> added it (like I thought, so I must have added it in gnulib instead);
> but Brian - in fact, the same Brian who is now working on adding %s to
> strptime().
> 
> The point remains: if you want your program to be portable, you should
> not use %s.  But if your program is okay with demanding a GNU/Linux
> environment rather than sticking to portable code, then Cygwin still
> tries to cater to that by providing as many GNU/Linux extensions as
> possible, and pointing out where we fall short is appreciated.  But
> still, someone has to code it, this is a volunteer effort, and we tend
> to scratch our own itches.  The fact that strptime() lagged strftime()
> by nearly 2 years in adding %s support is par for the course.  It's not
> worth complaining about, and if you want faster action, then submit
> patches yourself instead of asking others to do it for you.

My itch is that it doesn't work in dateutils strptime(1), so the hope is that if
%s (also %F) works in newlib libc strptime(3), that will get it working in
dateutils strptime(1), as it does in coreutils date(1), or I'll have to do some
more scratching.

Of course, C code could just convert the seconds strings to some BIG_INT, put it
in a time_t, and use localtime(3) or gmtime(3) to get a struct tm for use in
strftime(3). Shell scripts could use coreutils date(1) instead of dateutils
strptime(1) to convert time_t using %s (and more). It would be great if all the
time utilities and functions could support a consistent set (GNU) of time
conversion specifications.

-- 
Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

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