[PATCH] date representation: use ISO8601 rather than a specific locale

[Mads Kiilerich]

On 03/06/2015 02:03 PM, Thomas De Schampheleire wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 10:51 PM, Thomas De Schampheleire
> <patrickdepinguin at gmail.com> wrote:
>> # HG changeset patch
>> # User Thomas De Schampheleire <thomas.de.schampheleire at gmail.com>
>> # Date 1424987487 -3600
>> #      Thu Feb 26 22:51:27 2015 +0100
>> # Node ID d80090d1053468f6b84eb8ef41c62446995ddb73
>> # Parent  c7f97c237dacbed8770d4aacf20feb8175ee8d99
>> date representation: use ISO8601 rather than a specific locale
>>
>> Dates, in particular in technical systems like Kallithea, are
>> better shown in a clear concise format like ISO8601 (YYYY-MM-DD)
>> than in a verbose format like 'Thu, Feb 26 2015'.
>>
>> This commit changes all dates to ISO8601.
>>
>> ---
>> If desired, we could create two functions: one that returns ISO format and
>> another for the locale format. Depending on the usage, one or the other is
>> shown. I'm not very fond of that though, it looks inconsistent.
>>
>> diff --git a/kallithea/lib/helpers.py b/kallithea/lib/helpers.py
>> --- a/kallithea/lib/helpers.py
>> +++ b/kallithea/lib/helpers.py
>> @@ -469,7 +469,7 @@
>>
>>   def fmt_date(date):
>>       if date:
>> -        _fmt = u"%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S".encode('utf8')

Heh - making a const unicode string with all ascii chars and then 
encoding it to utf8 ... that seems a bit convoluted ;-)

It does however raise the question of how this function was supposed to 
handle locales where the name of the day or month had unicode chars.

With your changes it will always only be ascii chars and it would 
perhaps be more clear to use unicode(...) instead of .decode.

>> +        _fmt = u"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S".encode('utf8')
>>           return date.strftime(_fmt).decode('utf8')
>>
> config/conf.py actually contains definitions DATETIME_FORMAT and
> DATE_FORMAT, included from lib/helpers.py but not used:
>
> DATETIME_FORMAT = "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"
> DATE_FORMAT = "%Y-%m-%d"
>
> We should probably use that instead.

Agreed. They seems to be unused and could be removed, but having 
constants as constants seems nice ;-)

> What is the feedback on this patch?

No objections - I would push it soon ... but I guess you will post an 
updated version?

/Mads