[Bug 2122359] Re: date: invalid date 'now - X seconds'

[Dave Jones]

It's arguable if this is a bug in rust-coreutils or update-notifier. On
the one hand, if rust-coreutils wishes to be a perfect "drop-in"
replacement for GNU coreutils, it is something that needs fixing in
rust-coreutils.

On the other hand, looking at the full info documentation for GNU
coreutils "date", I can't find anywhere that says you *can* use a
fractional number in date offsets, which suggests we shouldn't. A
counter to that is: in practice GNU's "date" only appears to accept
fractional values for seconds, not for days, or hours, etc. which
suggests a special case has been made somewhere to explicitly permit
this, but which wasn't documented.

Ultimately, I don't see any particular advantage in update-notifier
continuing to use a  fractional seconds calculation here so I'll just
fix it here anyway.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/2122359

Title:
  date: invalid date 'now - X seconds'

Status in The Ubuntu-power-systems project:
  New
Status in rust-coreutils package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed
Status in update-notifier package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  run-parts is failing on 98-fsck-at-reboot, presumably due to rust-
  coreutils not supporting the arguments to `date`.

  this failure can be seen in the motd:

  date: invalid date 'now - X seconds'
  run-parts: /etc/update-motd.d/98-fsck-at-reboot exited with return code 1

  where X is a floating point number.

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