Date and time issues (Was: 24 hour time in Thunderbird)

[Robin Laing]

Ingemar Nilsson wrote:
> Hi.
> 
> After reading the thread about 24 hour time in Thunderbird, I decided to
> make some experiments with date and time formats. I have wished for a long
> time to set the date format to use ISO-8601 and to use a 24 hour clock, but
> how to do this hasn't been obvious.
> 
> I started by running Thunderbird with LC_TIME set to sv_SE.utf8, and sure,
> it showed date and time in the expected format. I then figured I'd check
> 'ls -l'. I was (very) surprised to see that ls -l now gives the date in
> ISO-8601 format, even though my LANG has the value
> 'en_US.UTF-8'. Substituting US for UK changed to the traditional format.
> 
> Why does LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8 give american date/time format in Thunderbird,
> but ISO-8601 format in 'ls -l'? And the same applies to sv_SE.UTF-8, which
> gives ISO-8601 format in Thunderbird, but another format in 'ls -l'. I'm
> really lost here.
> 
> This computer runs Fedora 7 with all updates up to today's batch. My
> physical locale is Sweden, with a Swedish keyboard, but my system language
> is English (which I wish to keep).
> 
> $ env | egrep '(LANG|LC)'
> LANG=en_US.UTF-8
> 
> Regards
> Ingemar
> 

Like you I want my system to display ISO-8601 date formats as a default. 
  Even those applications that grab the date format from the "system" date.

I was surprised that F7 shows "ls -l" as ISO format by default.  Not 
related to the LANG variable from what I have seen.

As for changing the date format, I have not had much success and I have 
made a request for a tool to do such.  It would be nice if there was a 
TZ file for US-ISO.  Or better yet, a tool to create a custom TZ file 
from what the user wants to use.

-- 
Due to the move to Exchange Server,
    anything that is a priority, please phone.
Robin Laing