It would be nice if Mailman, especially the pipermail archives, can use the international ISO 8601 date format. Also the website could use that throughout. Currently there is a mixture of different date formats.

List.org website

list.org uses different date formats

The current stable GNU Mailman version is2.1.10, released on21-Apr-2008. ( http://www.list.org/ )

28 Apr ( http://wiki.list.org/dashboard.action )

2008/04/10 in url ( http://wiki.list.org/display/DEV/2008/04/10/Mailman+3.0+alpha+1+released )

Apr 10, 2008 in text ( http://wiki.list.org/display/DEV/2008/04/10/Mailman+3.0+alpha+1+released )

September 12, 2007 http://www.list.org/mailman-member/index.html

Pipermail

Instead of

http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/tango-l/2006-October/002263.html

this would be an improvement:

http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/tango-l/2006-10/002263.html

even better to incorporate the exact date (if not configurable use UTC time?) in the URL.

http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/tango-l/2006-10-30/002263.html

other: April 2024 !!! http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/

Further thoughts

Does one need the "002263" at all? If the full time is used

http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/tango-l/2006-10-30T18:12:14

maybe only a disambiguater needs to be added for message at the same second?

Comments

Barry Warsaw

There's probably not much you can do about the website since all those dates are written by different people or software. I personally tend to use DD-MMM-YYYY format when I write dates manually, mostly because 1) I have an Emacs binding for it and 2) It's less prone to UK/US confusions .

You might have more luck fixing the dates in Pipermail, but I'll warn you that Pipermail is rough code to work with, and hasn't gotten much love in recent years.

John W. Baxter

I would prefer ISO 8601 dates. They are unambiguous across many cultures. They sort routinely as strings. And I'm used to them, as we use them at work (a very weak reason from the point of view of anyone else).

Brad Knowles

I've been using ISO 8601 format dates for years, and it was only a couple of years ago that I discovered what I was already doing had been standardized by the ISO.

The time format addition in the most recent version of the standard is pretty interesting.

And I've wanted to have the way pipermail generates URLs for articles fixed for years, but I'm not a Python programmer.

Sigh.... Anyway, count me in as a strong supporter of ISO 8601 format dates used consistently throughout all of Python, much less Mailman.