cal should report today

[Gon Solo]

I know about "ncal -b" and I know how to create an alias but I think a plain "cal" should highlight today too *especially* if the man page only gives an option for turning off highlighting of today (which doesn't work because cal is a symlink to ncal).

The whole "cal is a symlink to ncal" thing is confusing but at least cal should highlight today without an option.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 20.10
Package: ncal 12.1.7
Uname: Linux 5.11.0-051100rc5-lowlatency x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu50.5
Architecture: amd64
CasperMD5CheckResult: skip
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Thu Feb 4 09:06:25 2021
InstallationDate: Installed on 2018-04-04 (1036 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" - Release amd64 (20180105.1)
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm-256color
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
 LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: bsdmainutils
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to groovy on 2020-10-23 (103 days ago)

[TJ (tj)]

No, this is incorrect. called as 'cal' the intention is to be bit compatible with the original 'cal'. 'ncal' added the highlight option and as the man-page shows '-h' is only valid when it is called as 'ncal'.

Secondly highlighting when called as 'cal' was a (Debian) bug #9848389 which is referenced in the changelog for bsdmainutils (12.1.6):

* Cal should not highlight the current day. (Closes: #904839)

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=904839

[Akkana Peck (akkzilla)]

The cal man page says it highlights unless -h is specified, but it turns out that only applies to ncal, not cal, since -h isn't in the Synopsis lines for plain cal, and cal -h is an error.

Highlighting was apparently turned off deliberately: see upstream
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=904839
with this diff:
https://salsa.debian.org/meskes/bsdmainutils/-/blob/master/debian/patches/cal_highlight.diff
but if I apt source ncal on Ubuntu 20.10, the source doesn't have debian/patches/cal_highlight.diff and if I build it with dpkg-buildpackage, it doesn't have the behavior: it highlights even if I make a symlink to it and call it as "cal". I guess the source I get via apt source isn't in sync with the source that's used to build the binaries I get with apt install?

[Akkana Peck (akkzilla)]

Never mind that comment about apt source: turns out I was pulling from an earlier repository. The ubuntu commit is at https://git.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/bsdmainutils/tree/debian/patches/cal_highlight.diff?h=ubuntu/groovy