Fábio Beirão (May 30 2023 at 13:10): Fábio Beirão (May 30 2023 at 13:10):Looking at the output of roc --version I can see traces of Dutch. I'm wondering if this is related to my own machine or not, but running date prints out English on my machine, so perhaps other people can also check their machine?
Examples of roc --version:
(...) commit 62cdcea on Sa 27 Mai 2023 (...) Mai is Dutch for May
(...) commit ef05ec6 on Di 30 Mai 2023 (...) Di is Diesndag, (Tuesday in Dutch)
Fábio Beirão (May 30 2023 at 13:12):Looking at this, it doesn't seem to be related to my machine, but to the date output of the CI machine
Anton (May 30 2023 at 13:14):Yes indeed, this is from the CI machine, it is not dutch but German actually. When I install Ubuntu in Belgium it defaults to German locale for some reason :p
Richard Feldman (May 30 2023 at 14:34):I think a good fix for that would be to use the numbers-only ISO 8601 format for the date, e.g. 2023-06-01
Anton (May 30 2023 at 14:51):A small potential issue there is that it's hard to be sure which digits are for the month and which for the day. I think I would prefer June 1, 2023
Fábio Beirão (May 30 2023 at 14:58)::thinking: If I understand correctly, ISO 8601 is fixed and locale independent, so it's well-known which numbers are month and day.
On my machine, running date --utc --iso-8601=seconds yields 2023-05-30T14:56:52+00:00
Brendan Hansknecht (May 30 2023 at 15:04):yeah, always big to small. Though I can see how it is more thinking if you aren't used to it.
Anton (May 30 2023 at 15:19)::thinking: If I understand correctly, ISO 8601 is fixed and locale independent, so it's well-known which numbers are month and day.
On my machine, runningdate --utc --iso-8601=secondsyields2023-05-30T14:56:52+00:00
That is true but I don't expect the average roc user to be deeply familiar with ISO 8601 and be able to instantly recognize that the string2023-05-30T14:56:52+00:00 follows that standard.
Richard Feldman (May 30 2023 at 15:24):fair point :thumbs_up:
Fábio Beirão (May 30 2023 at 15:27):I think I understand better where you are coming from. I've been around ISO 8601 dates for too long :sweat_smile: I guess the delightful experience would be that the build system stores the ISO 8601 string, but then roc --version would need to get a bit smarter and parse this ISO 8601 string and print it out in the user's current locale/date format preferences. (I say this, because if we put English months in there, this might also not be inclusive to everyone).
Anton (May 30 2023 at 15:31):but then roc --version would need to get a bit smarter and parse this ISO 8601 string and print it out in the user's current locale/date format preferences.
Given that the output of roc --version is often shared in issues I think it is most beneficial if it uses the same format everywhere.
Fábio Beirão (May 30 2023 at 15:46):Ah, that is an excellent point too :sweat_smile:
Then perhaps both? roc --version == roc nightly pre-release, built from commit ef05ec6 on {user local datetime format+timezone} ({iso-8601 format}) ?
Anton (May 30 2023 at 15:49):I'm ok with both, what do others think?
Richard Feldman (May 30 2023 at 19:56):I think it's pretty common to check the output of program --version for exact matches
Richard Feldman (May 30 2023 at 19:56):I suspect having it sometimes print different output could lead to subtle bugs in peoples' build configs :sweat_smile:
Last updated: Jul 26 2025 at 12:14 UTC