Hello

On Slackware64 13.1 the as-installed en_GB locale gave Sunday as the first day of the week. This was not an issue until Xfce's Orage calendar was used when its display of Sunday as the first day of the week was offputting for someone used to Monday. A minor inconvenience but expected to be easy to fix.

At the command line:I tried to adjust the locale following information in the locale (5) man page. Based on that I edited /usr/share/i18n/locales/en_GB, changing:

• week from 7;19971130;4 to 7;19971201;4
• first_weekday from 2 to 1
• first_workday from 2 to 1
• abday, moving "<U0053><U0075><U006E>" from the beginning of the list to the end
• day, moving "<U0053><U0075><U006E><U0064><U0061><U0079>" from the beginning of the list to the end

Following information in the localedef (1) man page and the Arkanis Blog:
Now the date command and Orage display Sun 14 May 2011 when it should be Sat.

What have I misunderstood?

Best

Charles

By changing week you already set the start to "Monday", the changes to first_weekday and first_workday are too much. They already honour the value of "week". However, the XFCE calendar seems to not honour "first_weekday", it should have displayed monday as first day, even without any changes: 1997-11-30 was a sunday, with first_weekday=2 there is "monday" as week start.

Be aware that your changes to files in /usr/share/... will be overwritten in most distributions when the package containing the files is updated. Maybe it's better to make the changes permanent via an environment variable somewhere in /etc/env.d/. The "best practice" depends on your distro.

Thanks cepheus11

So days and abdays simply define a sequence of day names which start on the date nominated in week? And it is first_weekday and first_workday which define the first day of the weeks. For completeness, this can be explored at the command line (I've reverted to the as-installed locale):So the first day of the week is 1-based index 2 which is Monday. Not surprisingly then, the Slackware64 13.1 en_GB locale is set up correctly.

Thus the problem is in Orage but they say not so; from the Orage FAQ:

This really is a problem in your distro. You can check how your operating system reports these to GTK+ and hence to orage, which uses strictly gtk calendar widget and does not tune these settings itself. Command locale first_weekday shows which day is the first day in your system. Usually Sunday is day number 1, but that can be changed so check that with command locale day, which shows days starting from day number 1. You may try with different LANG enevironment variable settings and calendar view in orage should change accordingly. Log a new bug for orage if you think it is not working correctly. Look more information from Xfce bug 1237 or from Debian bug 215466

If you are adventurous, you can actually fix these yourself. You need to find your locale definition file (like fi_FI or fr_FR). locate is your friend here and helps finding it. After that you can check what the setting is: grep first_weekday fi_FI and change that if it is wrong and after that you need to recompile your locale database.

It was that last paragraph that got me to fix the "ain't broke".

The Debian bug is from 2003 and is about a Finnish locale file not having first_weekday and first_workday lines.

The Xfce bug is closely related and has useful discussion but was closed in 2007 as invalid because Orage "calls simply gtk_calendar_new ()" so if the calendar does not match the locale it is a GTK library problem. The GtkCalendar API documentation does not mention locale.

Netsearching for GtkCalendar locale bugs found nothing.

Time to post to the xfce4-dev@xfce.org mailing list, asking if there problem has been reported as a GTK bug ...