Use ISO 8601 dates in Portfile comments

[Joshua Root]

On 2019-4-8 04:25 , Christopher Chavez wrote:
> Currently, comments in Portfiles containing dates, such as for when remove something in the future, are specified in whichever scheme preferred by the port maintainer or whoever inserted the date. Some of these schemes are region-specific (e.g. mm/dd/yyyy used in the US) and potentially ambiguous.
> 
> With MacPorts being an international project, would it be preferable for MacPorts to exclusively use ISO 8601 dates (yyyy-mm-dd) for these purposes? Does that impose too much on maintainers? The primary advantage of doing this will be that it will be easier to search for any dates in Portfiles. I am willing to initiate pull request(s) to convert existing non-ISO 8601 examples I encounter.

I wouldn't be quite that prescriptive. The important thing is the
principle that there is an international audience reading, so only dates
that are unambiguous in that context should be used. Something like "6
May 2019" is fine for example.

ISO 8601 is a great compliant solution to recommend.

Changing ambiguous dates to something unambiguous is a reasonable thing
to submit PRs for if you so desire.

> Also, would it be preferable to insist on a consistent exact phrase for such comments: “Remove after yyyy-mm-dd”?

It would be fine to recommend this phrasing for ease of grepping, but
insisting on it doesn't sound helpful (though I'm not quite sure what
that would mean in practice).

- Josh