Bug 525134

That's just the default if there is no translation for the time style in your locale.

Caused by this upstream commit : http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/coreutils.git/commit/?id=6837183d42a0ccdf7b7106794ea693c5b609aea5 . Adding upstream maintainer - as maybe at least en_* (without translation) should be handled differently.

The problem may be that something is going wrong at install time.
Note that po/Makefile.in.in's install-data-yes rule loops over EXTRA_LOCALE_CATEGORIES, which bootstrap sets to LC_TIME.
That loop is supposed to create many locale-related symlinks.
If some part of that rule is failing for some locales, that could
explain why ls is detecting invalid locale settings and reverting to ISO.

Jim: I don't think that's the case. 

Simply: Default for long_time_format[2] is { N_("%b %e  %Y"),  N_("%b %e %H:%M")
). In ls.c (case locale_time_style)  is dcgettext (NULL, long_time_format[i], LC_TIME); ... that translates the string, but the translation is THE SAME as the default - as the format is the same for en_* locales.

And after that is check:
if (locale_format == long_time_format[i])
    goto case_long_iso_time_style;

That check is coming from the commit mentioned in comment #2 - and causes fallback to long_iso_time_style - and overriding translated time format for english locales. So at least this check should not be performed for en_* locales (but is quite strange to expect that noone will have default time format at all).

Ah!  I see what you mean.  That does look like an upstream bug.
Do you feel like writing the patch you suggest?

Yep, I'll try to write something today ...

Just to update. There are 108 languages on my fedora 11 box with this "issue".
It's been decided to wait for other reports before changing this 4 year old behaviour: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2009-09/msg00433.html

Hmm, to me it seems that this is fixed in Fedora 12 Beta + updates.

That's strange, because I did no such update - I'm waiting for upstream decision (or better said for another complain).

Whoops, please ignore my statement that this would be fixed, still an issue it seems:

localhost:~> LC_ALL=C ls -ld /
dr-xr-xr-x. 21 root root 4.0K Oct 23 19:25 /
localhost:~> LC_ALL=en_US ls -ld /
dr-xr-xr-x. 21 root root 4.0K 2009-10-23 19:25 /
localhost:~> LC_ALL=en_CA ls -ld /
dr-xr-xr-x. 21 root root 4.0K 2009-10-23 19:25 /
localhost:~> LC_ALL=de_DE ls -ld /
dr-xr-xr-x. 21 root root 4,0K 23. Okt 19:25 /
localhost:~> LC_ALL=da_DK ls -ld /
dr-xr-xr-x. 21 root root 4,0K 23 okt 19:25 /
localhost:~> rpm -q glibc-common coreutils
glibc-common-2.10.90-25.i686
coreutils-7.6-5.fc12.i686
localhost:~>

I think this works now as expected on F13ß:

localhost:~> unset TIME_STYLE
localhost:~> LC_ALL=C ls -ld /
dr-xr-xr-x. 22 root root 4.0K Apr 21 19:11 /
localhost:~> LC_ALL=en_US ls -ld /
dr-xr-xr-x. 22 root root 4.0K Apr 21 19:11 /
localhost:~> LC_ALL=en_CA ls -ld /
dr-xr-xr-x. 22 root root 4.0K Apr 21 19:11 /
localhost:~> LC_ALL=de_DE ls -ld /
dr-xr-xr-x. 22 root root 4,0K 21. Apr 19:11 /
localhost:~> LC_ALL=da_DK ls -ld /
dr-xr-xr-x. 22 root root 4,0K 21 apr 19:11 /
localhost:~> rpm -q glibc-common coreutils
glibc-common-2.11.90-20.i686
coreutils-8.4-5.fc13.i686
localhost:~>

Thanks, confirmed ... english translation file is now part of coreutils in F-13/rawhide. As I don't plan to fix that in F-11 and F-12, closing that NEXTRELEASE.

which rpm has the translation?
This is a fairly large change (people are temperamental about ls format).
If we're making the change, then perhaps we should do it consistently
for all languages with the upstream patch referenced in comment #7

In coreutils-8.4 tarball in po/en.po is translation for 
#: src/ls.c:733
msgid "%b %e  %Y"
msgstr "%b %e  %Y"
and
#: src/ls.c:746
msgid "%b %e %H:%M"
msgstr "%b %e %H:%M"

Therefore en_* locales are no longer affected. Those languages without translated time/date format message string for ls.c:733/746 will fallback to ISO date format as before... so I think it is still consistent, but english locales now have correct date format instead of the ISO format.

If you are searching for rpms, coreutils-8.4 are in rawhide and F-13 (you could either use its beta repo or http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=155772 ).