Re: Out-of-the-box "date format" values for "default" and "en_US" locales

Hi Frediano,

On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 8:39 AM, Frediano Ziglio <[email protected]> wrote:
> Il 09/Apr/2015 18:40, "Geoff Montee" <[email protected]> ha scritto:
>>
>> In FreeTDS, the "default" and "en_US" locales have the following values of
>> "date format" defined in locales.conf:
>>
>> [default]
>>     date format = %b %e %Y %I:%M:%S:%z%p
>>
>> [en_US]
>>     date format = %b %e %Y %I:%M:%S:%z%p
>>     language = us_english
>>     charset = iso_1
>>
>> Is there a reason that FreeTDS chose to separate the seconds and
>> milliseconds with a colon (':'), rather than a dot ('.')? A few users of
>> tds_fdw recently ran into issues with this:
>>
>> https://github.com/GeoffMontee/tds_fdw/issues/13
>>
>> Because of the ISO 8601 standard, I think most applications expect a dot
>> separator between seconds and milliseconds.
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
>>
>> These days, it may make sense to use ISO 8601 as the default "date
> format",
>> since it is pretty universal. If FreeTDS is going to have a new release
>> soon, maybe it would be worth changing the default date format?
>
> I don't remember the history but must be quite old.
>
> Yes, default can change. As long is well documented I don't see the point
> keeping the colon.
>

Thanks for the reply!

Changing the colon to a dot sounds good to me.

Would it be worth changing the default completely to an ISO
8601-compatible format? That would probably be something like:

[default]
 date format = %Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%z

The main difference between that and ISO-8601 is that it wouldn't
contain the timezone offset. strftime uses %z for the timezone offset,
but FreeTDS uses %z for the milliseconds.

Thanks,

Geoff