Re: [PATCH] en_US: define date_fmt (bug 24046)

[Aurelien Jarno <aurelien at aurel32 dot net>]

On 2018-12-31 19:16, Rafal Luzynski wrote:
> 31.12.2018 12:07 Aurelien Jarno <aurelien@aurel32.net> wrote:
> > 
> > [...]
> > I don't think this has been a deliberated choice. Support for date_fmt
> > (which is a GNU extension), has been added back in 2000 in commit
> > d8337213c8. At that time all locales got date_fmt set to the default
> > setting, and later locales got this value updated through the years.
> > This has never been done for the US locale. Then in commit 2e7a461328
> > all locales with the default value got this field removed.
> 
> Thank you for this research.  There are many locales which don't have
> date_fmt defined which means they use the default value from C locale:
> "%a %b %e %H:%M:%S %Z %Y".  This is bad for many of them because this
> assumes the date order is MDY which is not the most popular order

By looking at the difference between d_t_fmt and date_fmt in the locales
having both, it seems to me that the later has been added to display the
full date and time, including the timezone. Indeed for countries that
only span a single timezone, it is usually not displayed.

I have added Jim Meyering in Cc: who have done commit 5ca6863e97 on the
coreutils side, so that the can confirm about that. If he stills
remember of course, as the commit has been done more than 18 years
ago...

> around the world.  I did not yet have time to file a bug report and/or
> fix it, anybody feel free to do it.

I have just opened BZ 24054 about that.

> > [...]
> > > I wonder whether our users expect such a change.
> > 
> > At least a few users, but I agree it's difficult to know for the
> > majority of users.
> 
> I think we had sufficient confirmations here.

Given we are now in freeze period and given the patch has been posted
only recently in a period with many people away from their computer, I
think it's better to wait a bit to give the chance for other people to
comment. After all it has been like that for more than 18 years, so we
can wait a few weeks more. I'll repost this patch once glibc 2.29 has
been released.

Regards,
Aurelien

-- 
Aurelien Jarno                          GPG: 4096R/1DDD8C9B
aurelien@aurel32.net                 http://www.aurel32.net