Bug 657588

Summary:	Short month names in the zh_CN locale contain space
Product:	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5	Reporter:	Göran Uddeborg <goeran>
Component:	glibc	Assignee:	Jeff Law <law>
Status:	CLOSED ERRATA	QA Contact:	qe-baseos-tools-bugs
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	low
Version:	5.5	CC:	fweimer, law, mfranc, pfrankli, pmuller
Target Milestone:	rc
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	Unspecified
OS:	Unspecified
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:	Same as RHEL 6.3 BZ 785984	Story Points:	---
Clone Of:
Clones:	785984 (view as bug list)		Environment:
Last Closed:	2013-01-08 03:44:56 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:
Bug Depends On:
Bug Blocks:	785984

Description Göran Uddeborg 2010-11-26 16:44:45 UTC

Description of problem:
The short version of month names in zh_CN starts with a space for January through September.  But the space is not actually part of the month name, I'm sure, even if I don't know any Chinese.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
glibc-2.5-49.el5_5.7

How reproducible:
Every time

Steps to Reproduce:
1. for i in `seq 1 12` ; do LANG=zh_CN.utf8 date -d `printf 2010%02d01 $i` +%b ; done
  
Actual results:
 1月
 2月
 3月
 4月
 5月
 6月
 7月
 8月
 9月
10月
11月
12月

Expected results:
1月
2月
3月
4月
5月
6月
7月
8月
9月
10月
11月
12月


Additional info:
I guess the reason for the spaces is to make these names have the same length in a display.  And when printing, it maybe doesn't cause problems too often.  But when reading a date with strptime(), it causes problems if the pattern is space separated.

Using a strptime() pattern like "%Y.%b.%d" can be made to work.  It requires that the input really has a space in the month name, so "2010. 1月.26" would be accepted, while "2010.1月.26" would not.  It could be surprising for a human entering the time.

If the date is space separated, it gets worse.  If the pattern is e.g. "%Y %b %d" there is no way to enter a date in months other than October, November, or December.  The space after %Y will match any number of spaces in the input.  There will never be any space "left" to become part of the month name.

Comment 1 RHEL Program Management 2012-04-02 13:07:53 UTC

This request was evaluated by Red Hat Product Management for inclusion
in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux release.  Product Management has
requested further review of this request by Red Hat Engineering, for
potential inclusion in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux release for currently
deployed products.  This request is not yet committed for inclusion in
a release.

Comment 4 Patsy Griffin 2012-06-12 02:23:41 UTC

    Technical note added. If any revisions are required, please edit the "Technical Notes" field
    accordingly. All revisions will be proofread by the Engineering Content Services team.
    
    New Contents:
Same as RHEL 6.3 BZ 785984

Comment 6 errata-xmlrpc 2013-01-08 03:44:56 UTC

Since the problem described in this bug report should be
resolved in a recent advisory, it has been closed with a
resolution of ERRATA.

For information on the advisory, and where to find the updated
files, follow the link below.

If the solution does not work for you, open a new bug report.

http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2013-0022.html