On one system I log into (alas, I can't find which one it was!), the
date manpage mentions that date %D is considered bad because of
internationalisation issues.  America is the only country to use
%m/%d/%y.  Since American programmers seem to assume its a good format
to use in their scripts, it would be a good idea if the manpage in
debian came with a big fat warning like: "%D is considered bad because
it is ambigious internationally for 12 days of each month -- most of
the world have traditionally interpreted dates as %d/%m/%y.  Use
something like `date --rfc-3339=date' or %Y/%m/%d if you wish to
uniquely identify a date, which has the bonus of sorting trivially".

Then I can go submit a bug for the reports generated by checksecurity
:)

forwarded 491392 https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=75208
thanks

I was hoping the maintainer would do it, but I've finally forwarded the
bug upstream and got a small concession in the wording of the info doc.