Re: Everyone, please stop making my life more difficult

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 15:57:02 +0200
> 
> Of course the format %ct is in UTC.  It's just the raw number.

Right, so it will need a converter.

> For formatting times, POSIX provides/prescribes strftime.  All the
> formats in strftime are in local time with the exception of %s (the raw
> second number in UTC), %z (the numeric timezone) and %Z (the timezone
> name).
> 
> Git does offer the --date=raw option that will produce the ilk of
> 
> commit 85e17384aceddcb761f48f95ee2244a60f9e8408
> Author: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
> Date:   1410511700 +0200
> 
>     Let Lyric_combine_music_iterator use SyllableEvent

I'm just surprised that something that's trivially available in bzr
(and evidently hg as well, but I'm not sure about the latter) isn't
available with git, that's all.  --date accepts 6 different values (in
addition to 'default'), but not UTC.

> I am somewhat surprised that you should state that setting TZ to UTC is
> not going to be portable.  Why?

Windows runtime doesn't support such a value of TZ.  (msysGit works
around that by using a private timezone database, but setting TZ
inside Emacs to a non-supported value, or doing that in a script that
might invoke programs not belonging to the msysGit package, is playing
with fire.)