Re: policy around 'wontfix' bug tag

[rhkramer@gmail.com]

On Monday, February 05, 2018 08:07:47 AM Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> On 2018-02-04 08:22:23 -0500, Michael Stone wrote:
> > On Mon, Feb 05, 2018 at 12:48:45AM +1300, Richard Hector wrote:
> > > In which case, it should refuse to accept '4/2/2018' at all, right?
> > 
> > It can't, that would break working scripts. This is the heart of the
> > problem: we know the parser is horrible, confusing, and irregular, but
> > any attempt to change it will break lots of stuff that depends on the
> > current brokenness.
> 
> It is not rare that the behavior of utilities change and break
> scripts. So, why not here, in particular for a good reason?

I'm not really going to answer the question, I think MIke Stone has answered 
it for you.  The way forward would seem (to me) to be to create a new date 
function (ndate?) (or a new option to date) that provides the desired better 
functionality.

I assume (I know) that the license for date is some free / open source license 
that would allow you to incorporate the old code into a new function (probably 
with appropriate citation / credit) and then add / modify / delete code as 
desired.

OK, I will say one thing--I suspect this is something like the (forget what 
they called it)--the year 2000 problem--there is code that people (and 
companies depend on) that is so old that the maintainers are long gone, thus 
breaking that old function wouild be a very bad thing.