Bug 68861

Summary:	Man page strftime Confusingly Refers to Weekday Rather than Day of Week
Product:	Documentation	Reporter:	Brandon Edens (bedens)
Component:	man-pages	Assignee:	documentation_man-pages (documentation_man-pages)
Status:	RESOLVED CODE_FIX
Severity:	low	CC:	mtk.manpages
Priority:	P1
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Kernel Version:		Subsystem:
Regression:	No	Bisected commit-id:
Attachments:	Patch to man-pages archive. Patch to man-pages-posix archive.

Description Brandon Edens 2014-01-16 23:09:09 UTC

In several parts of the strftime page there are references to weekday which in several human cultures / locales specifies the set of the days of the week that are distinct from the set that represent the weekend.

To mitigate confusion, we propose that the man page text be modified so that the "weekday" text is changed to "day of week".

Comment 1 Brandon Edens 2014-01-16 23:10:08 UTC

Created attachment 122331 [details]
Patch to man-pages archive.

Comment 2 Brandon Edens 2014-01-16 23:10:39 UTC

Created attachment 122341 [details]
Patch to man-pages-posix archive.

Comment 3 Michael Kerrisk 2014-01-17 08:10:52 UTC

Brandon,

Note that we can't patch the POSIX pages. they are supplied to us by the standards committee. You could try raising an issue with the Austin group; not sure how far it would get though, since POSIX has been using this term for a long time now.

However, I do agree with the point that there is ambiguity here, and I've applied a slightly modified version of your patch.

I've also made a similar change in the following pages:

getdate.3
strptime.3
locale.5

Thanks for the report.

Cheers,

Michael

Comment 4 Brandon Edens 2014-01-20 19:49:56 UTC

That's great. Thanks Michael.