Hello,

In message "Re: Who the f*heck is Tadayoshi Funaba and why can he reject sensible patches unilaterally?"
    on Sat, 3 May 2014 01:32:09 -0500, Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras / gmail.com> writes:

|And why are you ignoring my other arguments?
|
|1) DateTime.strftime with "%s %z" is *already* using the tz instead of UTC
|2) Time.strptime with "%s %z" is *already* using the tz (and Time.strftime)
|
|Why would you create this inconsistency? Even if you ignore the
|behavior of glibc, Ruby MRI is *already* using the timezone correctly
|for "%s %z" in several places. I would really like an answer to that.
|
|  DateTime.parse("1970-01-01 01:00 +0100").strftime("%s %z")
|  => "0 +0100"

According to the discussion in Japanese, formatting (output) is OK,
but parsing is not.  For example, "Sat May 3 00:00:00 2014" can be
parsed as a correct date, but "Fri May 3 00:00:00 2014" is not,
because it contains contradicting information.  Hence at least some
part of the original string should be ignored.  That wouldn't happen
in output.  According to Tadayoshi's opinion, time_t (%s)
fundamentally comes without timezone information from its definition,
so that the combination is meaningless, thus ignored.

I know unlike day of the week, timezone information does not
contradict with time_t.  They are independent.  I don't think his
opinion is universal truth, but at least I respect his opinion.
When our opinions differ, I try to persuade.

So please tell me, why do you want to parse date strings in form of
"%s %z"?  Just for consistency?  Or something git related?  If git
somehow uses this kind of strings pretty often, that fact might be a
good reason to support.  Otherwise you can always use _strptime()
method, which parses and retrieves as much information it finds, as
Tadayoshi stated before.

|Why are we talking about persuading him? If we, the project, agree
|that this is the way to go, why would the opinion of a single person
|hold hostage the change we all agree is right?

Because whole date/datetime is his masterpiece.  He designed and
implemented it from scratch.  He has been maintained it for long time.
I don't want to force him in any way just because his work is bundled
with Ruby.  Just like I don't want to be forced to do anything just
because of Ruby is a part of something, e.g. a Linux distribution.

Once I asked him for permission to bundle his work with Ruby, but I
didn't take it away from him.  I don't want to lose him, nor date
subsystem, his long time effort and huge contribution to the Ruby
world, just because our opinion is different in corner cases.

							matz.