Re: calendar (1) and possible changes

[Robert Elz <kre%munnari.OZ.AU@localhost>]

    Date:        Wed, 21 Oct 2009 07:22:36 -0500 (CDT)
    From:        "Jeremy C. Reed" <reed%reedmedia.net@localhost>
    Message-ID:  
<alpine.NEB.2.01.0910210719430.12086%t1.m.reedmedia.net@localhost>

  | See
  | 
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=calendar&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+7.2-RELEASE&format=html
  | for the -F option

Yes, that looks to be the same as the one in the patch you forwarded
(different option letter, but that's unimportant right now).

More interesting from that is that it appears that FreeBSD have a
vastly improved calendar program, and it might be more sensible to
just import theirs rather than continuing fixing ours.

The man page suggests that they do better with cpp include processing
than we do, and their input file syntax allows lots of stuff that I
had contemplated adding ("first tuesday in november" type stuff - I
never would have contemplated an Easter date generator though!)

The only issue I can see is that they require a tab as a separator
between the date specifier, and the message, ours doesn't care
what's there (which is why fixing the "Wednesday Wednesday" type
specifier gets hard, with their required tab it wouldn't even be an
issue.   But that might break user's calendar files, so it is the
one thing that would require thought.

  | Thank you much for your patch. I will put it in place. (I use calendar 
  | everyday for simple reminders.)

OK, great, for now it at least fixes some of the bugs until a decision
can be made what to do next.

kre

ps: I'm likely to be out of touch until next week from (about) now.