Description of problem: With more and more internalization of businesses, date formatting as provided by the default locale's is getting more and more complicated. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): glibc-common-2.5-10.fc6 How reproducible: Very easy. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Select en_CA.utf8 as your locale 2. Try to change date format to ISO 8601 from any of the tools 3. Pull hair out. 4. In a terminal type in date and see a non-ISO date format. Actual results: Even changing LC_TIME=en-DK.utf8 I still get dates in the wrong format. Expected results: With a tool like (ugh) Microsoft Windows that allows me to change the system wide default formatting for all the LC_variables. Something that allows programs like OpenOffice that depend on the default locale settings for some of its' features. Additional info: I have been trying things for the past few years but I am starting to realize that the only way is going to be change is to learn how to make my own TZDATA files to fit my requirements. It would be nice if there was a tool that when you set your locale in the Language settings that allowed you to set your date formats and measurements. Or a better selection of en_*.utf8_ISO locales. I now know that this is a glibc related problem but there needs to be an easier way for the desktop user.
For date(1) you can customize the output easily from the command line as much as you want (see the +FORMAT option), similarly most other programs which use strftime(3). If you really need to change the defaults in locale, the locale format is standardized, localedef as its compiler as well and you can easily copy most of the sections from some locale and only change the ones you want, say by writing the attached ~/en_CA@time which inherits everything from en_CA, but LC_TIME, edit it to suit your needs (the *fmt* strings are the standard strftime(3) format strings) and then compile it, say localedef -i ~/en_CA@time -f UTF-8 ~/en_CA.utf-8@time See http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/localedef.html http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/xbd_chap07.html http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/strftime.html http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/date.html for details.
Created attachment 149094 [details] en_CA@time
So, you can customize everything as much as you need. If all you are looking is some GUI click here and click there tool that would do that for you, then this request is misplaced, glibc certainly shouldn't provide those.
If this isn't the place to put this request, then where is it supposed to go? I don't argue about this point but for a desktop environment in a smaller organization, this is important.
File an enhancement request against the distribution component?