Re: [Fetchmail-users] how to log date/time in daemon mode?

[Gene H. <ghe...@sh...>]

On Monday 01 October 2018 14:00:03 Matthias Andree wrote:

> Am 01.10.18 um 19:19 schrieb Hans Carlson:
> > Someone a bit more enterprising than me could probably submit a
> > patch with some kind of config file option (eg. log_timestamp) to do
> > something similar.  It would be wise to also add a config file
> > option that specified the format for the timestamp, with the default
> > timestamp something more universally acceptable and standard than
> > the format I used.
>
> Hi Gene, Hans, everybody else,
>
> I'd be bold (as the maintainer) and share the insight that adding
> options is an expensive process. It requires options parsing, twice
> (command line, and rcfile), option dumping, at that, documentation,
> testing, string translations, future compatibility considerations -
> for a few lines of code around strftime() and gmtime() calls we'd
> easily add 100 lines over the place for making things configurable.
>
> I am somewhat inclined to take a variant of your (Hans's) patch and
> make it emit ISO8601 formatted time stamps, in UTC (to avoid ambiguity
> of 2:05 A and 2:05 B in the night when the DST is switched off), and
> that's it.

I'd not have a problem if it was in UTC.

The manpage should clearly reflect that however.

> The alternative would be a plain timestamp (seconds since 
> UTC Epoch or something) that would require further formatting through
> an external program---but then again a program that translated ISO8601
> UTC timestamps to an arbitrary local time zone wouldn't have to be
> much more than a few lines of Perl.
>
> The consideration is whether this could go into 6.4, or would have to
> wait for 7.0. The log file format is not really specified, so changing
> it isn't breaking any documented interface, just breaking past
> practice, so it might cause some astonishment. Opinions?
>
> Best regards,
> Matthias
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Cheers, Gene Heskett
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