214904 - The ISO-8601 format should be used for the dates in install.log

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core Graveyard :: Installer: XPInstall Engine, defect)

Description

[Vincent Lefevre]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux ppc; en-US; rv:1.5b) Gecko/20030803
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux ppc; en-US; rv:1.5b) Gecko/20030803

The install.log file currently has dates in the MM/DD/YYYY format, e.g.

http://aggreg8.mozdev.org/aggreg8.xpi  --  08/03/2003 09:00:21

and this looks incorrect for some European people (for instance, in France, this
would be March 8 instead of August 3). ISO-8601 dates (YYYY-MM-DD) should be
used instead. And the time should be UTC time or the timezone should be written
to the log file too.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Felix Miata]

I agree about the requested date format YYYY-MM-DD, but time should be local,
regardless of time zone. Why should Moz have to figure out whether local time is
UTC time? To me, that would be useless bloat.

Comment 2

[José Henrique F. Melman]

Useless and probably confusing. Sometimes people don't properly set the
timezone, and just adjust the time. This should not be a great matter, since
most of these people wouldn't even bother reading an install log, but the
install time is too related to the specific installation, the timezone
information would be redundant.

Comment 3

[beanladen]

American developers tend to ignore ISO time standards often since these don't
resemble the 'native' format. I think Mozilla should be more strict in spreading
such standards, since they help us to make better and easier maintanable software,
e.g., ISO 8601 is automatically sortable and even has time periods and recurring
intervals in a special notation. This could also simplifiy time and event handling
throughout the whole code (instead of struggling with all the special formats
used here and there).

Comment 4

[Vincent Lefevre]

People must set the timezone correctly, and if they don't, this is their
problem. Mozilla shouldn't behave some way because users do wrong things
(otherwise it should behave like MSIE, since most people write pages for MSIE).
Well, if you think that the local time is more appropriate, OK for the local
time. But as the timezone is not a constant, it would be a really good idea to
write it to the log file after the time. It wouldn't be redundant for some
users, and may be useful when copying logs for bug reports.

Comment 5

[Mats Palmgren (inactive)]

*If* you are going to indicate timezone, I suggest you use the "offset from UTC"
form, for example: 2003-08-05 13:44:42 (+0200)

It's much more convenient than having to "translate" what offset a specific
abbreviation has.  Note also that the abbreviated form (e.g. "PDT") are now
obsolete in for example RFC 2822:
http://www.zvon.org/tmRFC/RFC2822/Output/chapter4.html#sub3

I don't think having the timezone in the log file is terribly important myself.
Using the ISO 8601 date format is important though.

Comment 6

[Vincent Lefevre]

> *If* you are going to indicate timezone, I suggest you use the "offset from UTC"
> form, for example: 2003-08-05 13:44:42 (+0200)

Of course. This is standardized by the ISO 8601 too, AFAIK (by adding something
like +0200 or +02:00).

Comment 7

[Constantine A. Murenin]

Attachment: patch for xpinstall/src/nsLoggingProgressNotifier.cpp

Taking bug. 
Creating a patch that concurs with the consensus. :-)

Comment 8

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

Comment on attachment 142701 [details] [diff] [review]
patch for xpinstall/src/nsLoggingProgressNotifier.cpp

r=dveditz

The install log is intended for debugging and tech support type use. Users are
not expected to be looking at this file.

Comment 9

[Constantine A. Murenin]

I think the debate about time-zone ended up as "local time should be used" and
"no time-zone should appear in the log". I can agree with others that using
time-zone will only confuse users. That said, we are going to close the bug as
soon as the simple patch is applied. Consider opening a new bug if you want to
have time-zone to appear in the Install Log. 

Comment 10

[[e-mail]]

Fix checked in.