support for different calendars (e.g. Persian) across the desktop environment and file managers

[Farid Cheraghi]

Dear Collin,

great news! So I don't have to use `jdate` (from ashkang/jcal project) for
Persian date conversion/manipulation; its usage is not inconsistent with
coreutils `date`  (and friends). Anyway, I think this is the road ahead and
sooner or later it should be implemented in glibc. There needs to be
coordination between glibc and FreeDesktop/Gnome/KDE developers to make
this a smooth transition.

Thanks

On Wed, Jan 7, 2026 at 8:48 PM Collin Funk <collin.funk1@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Farid,
>
> Farid Cheraghi <faridcher@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > Hi,
> > I would like to have Persian dates in my file manager (nautilus/dolphin).
> > There are various efforts to bring Persian (or other) calendars to
> popular
> > desktop environments (GNOME, KDE) as an extension but not fully
> integrated
> > with them.For example, see:
> >
> > https://github.com/omid/Persian-Calendar-for-Gnome-Shell/issues/174
> > https://github.com/SCR-IR/gnome-shamsi-calendar/issues/54
> > https://github.com/amirnajaffi/shamsi-calendar-plasmoid/issues
> >
> > Changing the system language and format won't affect nautilus and other
> > parts of the desktop calendar system.
> > should this be implemented at libc level? If yes, there is a jcal C
> library
> > already implemented the logic. It just needs some effort to integrate it
> > with libc.
> > https://github.com/ashkang/jcal
> >
> > Microsoft has already implemented this feature for its Windows OS and I
> > feel desperate not to have it in my favorite Linux Distro.
>
> In GNU coreutils 9.8 we started converting Gregorian calendars to other
> calendars based on the locale. Here is the NEWS entry:
>
>     'date' now outputs dates in the country's native calendar for the
>     Iranian locale (fa_IR) and for the Ethiopian locale (am_ET), and also
>     does so more consistently for the Thailand locale (th_TH.UTF-8).
>
> So it shouldn't be too difficult to implement.
>
> However, changing the calendar will almost certainly break applications.
> So I doubt we will be able to do it in glibc.
>
> Collin
>
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