[Sugar-devel] setting date and time (was: re: journal sort options)

[Tom Parker]

On Fri, 2010-08-20 at 09:30 +1000, James Cameron wrote:

> > Our deployment was not connected to the internet so I didn't try to
> > work out how the rdate server works and whether it was installed but
> > not enabled.
> 
> I suggest you test things while you have internet access before you go
> to where you do not.

That is my recommendation too! We prepared where we could, but there
were a number of things (setting the time being one) where we didn't
know we would like to do them until we were actually there. This was
made worse by the deployment running a build we weren't expecting.

> > > 3.  yet another tool is the Linux date command,  but the format of
> > > the input is archaic.  I do not recommend it.
> > 
> > Not only is it archaic, it is undocumented :(
> 
> Not so, it is certainly documented, just that the format is strange.
> You can find the documentation in the manual page for the date command,
> and in the info page.

And, at least on my ubuntu box, in date --help. I must say I have stared
at that man page in the past and never interpreted the
[MMDDhhmm[[CC]YY][.ss]] as instructions for setting the time, but now
you point it out, it is fairly obvious.

> I'm an OpenFirmware release engineer.  There are too many commands to
> document them fully within the scope of the firmware itself, since the
> documentation could easily exceed the available space for the firmware.

I did figure that there would be space issues.

> However, there is a possibility of adding some additional text, but to
> do this properly I need to know from you exactly *what* commands you
> were looking for.

The battery related commands were the ones that I was actually looking
for -- I didn't know you could set the time in OFW. A list of the
possible tests would have saved some time, I had to watch a few test
runs cycle through to the touch pad and keyboard tests before I could
investigate. That said, there is a workaround (run them all and wait) so
documentation for other things would be preferable if you have to choose
what to document.

> Also, when do you plan to upgrade the firmware version so that you have
> this documentation available?

I'm not really asking for improvements for any deadline, just making a
suggestion to help future ill-prepared travellers. An alternative would
be a way to copy the olpc and sugarlabs wikis -- I tried to do this in
Samoa (we made friends with the local ISP) but my time was limited and
my spider too naive, so I had to kill it.