Re: [Usability] date format

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Sun, 2007-08-19 at 12:32 +0100, jorge santos wrote:

> I live in Portugal and our date format is ISO (yyyy-mm-dd). Since I 
> always use all of my software in US English the date format changes 
> automatically to the mm-dd-yyyy format which is BAD for me, and I hate 
> it :).
> 
> Is there a way to make it possible, in future Gnome releases, to select 
> the date formats independently from the Language selected by the user?

You're right that we could perhaps do a better job of this.  On the plus
side, because GNOME respects the *nix environment's choice of date
format (which I suspect KDE doesn't if you can change it on the fly for
running applications), it's relatively easy to do what you want.

The global fix would be to set your LC_TIME environment variable to your
chosen locale, so that gnome-session and all the apps launched in your
session pick it up.  Not sure which file you would have to edit to
achieve this; would probably depend on which distro you're running.

For specific apps, you should be able to use the same approach to
override the date format on the command line, e.g. run 'LC_TIME=pt
evolution' or whatever.  (Not sure whether 'pt' is actually the right
locale for you-- that doesn't seem to provide ISO format dates either.)
Of course, you could encapsulate this in a launcher icon for easy access
too.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems