strbuf_addftime(): handle "%s" manually

The strftime() function has a non-standard "%s" extension, which prints
the number of seconds since the epoch. But the "struct tm" we get has
already been adjusted for a particular time zone; going back to an epoch
time requires knowing that zone offset. Since strftime() doesn't take
such an argument, round-tripping to a "struct tm" and back to the "%s"
format may produce the wrong value (off by tz_offset seconds).

Since we're already passing in the zone offset courtesy of c3fbf81a85
(strbuf: let strbuf_addftime handle %z and %Z itself, 2017-06-15), we
can use that same value to adjust our epoch seconds accordingly.

Note that the description above makes it sound like strftime()'s "%s" is
useless (and really, the issue is shared by mktime(), which is what
strftime() would use under the hood). But it gets the two cases for
which it's designed correct:

  - the result of gmtime() will have a zero offset, so no adjustment is
    necessary

  - the result of localtime() will be offset by the local zone offset,
    and mktime() and strftime() are defined to assume this offset when
    converting back (there's actually some magic here; some
    implementations record this in the "struct tm", but we can't
    portably access or manipulate it. But they somehow "know" whether a
    "struct tm" is from gmtime() or localtime()).

This latter point means that "format-local:%s" actually works correctly
already, because in that case we rely on the system routines due to
6eced3ec5e (date: use localtime() for "-local" time formats,
2017-06-15). Our problem comes when trying to show times in the author's
zone, as the system routines provide no mechanism for converting in
non-local zones. So in those cases we have a "struct tm" that came from
gmtime(), but has been manipulated according to our offset.

The tests cover the broken round-trip by formatting "%s" for a time in a
non-system timezone. We use the made-up "+1234" here, which has two
advantages. One, we know it won't ever be the real system zone (and so
we're actually testing a case that would break). And two, since it has a
minute component, we're testing the full decoding of the +HHMM zone into
a number of seconds. Likewise, we test the "-1234" variant to make sure
there aren't any sign mistakes.

There's one final test, which covers "format-local:%s". As noted, this
already passes, but it's important to check that we didn't regress this
case. In particular, the caller in show_date() is relying on localtime()
to have done the zone adjustment, independent of any tz_offset we
compute ourselves. These should match up, since our local_tzoffset() is
likewise built around localtime(). But it would be easy for a caller to
forget to pass in a correct tz_offset to strbuf_addftime(). Fortunately
show_date() does this correctly (it has to because of the existing
handling of %z), and the test continues to pass. So this one is just
future-proofing against a change in our assumptions.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/rev-list-options.txt b/Documentation/rev-list-options.txt
index b7bd27e171..2ead371c89 100644
--- a/Documentation/rev-list-options.txt
+++ b/Documentation/rev-list-options.txt
@@ -1053,7 +1053,7 @@ omitted.
 has no effect.
 
 `--date=format:...` feeds the format `...` to your system `strftime`,
-except for %z and %Z, which are handled internally.
+except for %s, %z, and %Z, which are handled internally.
 Use `--date=format:%c` to show the date in your system locale's
 preferred format.  See the `strftime` manual for a complete list of
 format placeholders. When using `-local`, the correct syntax is