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8. Use ISO 8601 Format for Dates

Date: 2017-02-21

Status

Accepted

Context

adr-tools seeks to communicate the history of architectural decisions of a project. An important component of the history is the time at which a decision was made.

To communicate effectively, adr-tools should present information as unambiguously as possible. That means that culture-neutral data formats should be preferred over culture-specific formats.

Existing adr-tools deployments format dates as dd/mm/yyyy by default. That formatting is common formatting in the United Kingdom (where the adr-tools project was originally written), but is easily confused with the mm/dd/yyyy format preferred in the United States.

The default date format may be overridden by setting ADR_DATE in config.sh.

Decision

adr-tools will use the ISO 8601 format for dates: yyyy-mm-dd

Consequences

Dates are displayed in a standard, culture-neutral format.

The UK-style and ISO 8601 formats can be distinguished by their separator character. The UK-style dates used a slash (/), while the ISO dates use a hyphen (-).

Prior to this decision, adr-tools was deployed using the UK format for dates. After adopting the ISO 8601 format, existing deployments of adr-tools must do one of the following:

  • Accept mixed formatting of dates within their documentation library.
  • Update existing documents to use ISO 8601 dates by running adr upgrade-repository