It is bit clumsy that to change the Thunderbird date format the locale has to be set correctly.

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewto...f=39&t=2066255

It would have been better if Thunderbird would have obeyed the KDE regional settings. But it doesn't.

It the solution as pointed to above, there is the problem to create a separate script to set the locale right. This is not necessary.

In KDE (and probably any DE where a menu item can be edited) simply change the menu command to:
(Change Icedove to Thunderbird for non-Debian).

This command uses the property of the shell that the PARM=value is passed to the environment of the called program.

jlinkels

Hi there,

well, I don't know how KDE handles regional settings. In Windows, T-Bird complies to the system-wide settings; under Gnome or MATE, T-Bird still honors the system locale, which has to be set appropriately. So what's your point?

Of course it's not. If you want the date in ISO-8601 format, select a locale that follows this standard, and T-Bird will comply to that like almost any other application will.

[X] Doc CPU

In Windows, if you set the date format in Control panel to yyyyMMdd, all applications I know display the date like yyyyMMdd. Now I must admit, this is all applications I know, which is not many. I am using Windows only when I am getting paid for doing so. And T'bird is not among the applications I tested. Is there a separate locale setting in Windows except for Regional Settings?

Anyway, if KDE offers to set the regional settings format to yyyyMMdd and some applications obey that and others only thru a locale, it is confusing at best. If the recommended way to set a date format is through a locale, KDE had better omitted this setting at all.

Yes T'bird obeys, and more things happen. I have been running applications which insisted of showing the months and days in Danish text. Yes, I know, the locale was en_DK. I don't recall which one that was, but it precluded setting a system-wide locale. And yes, I know it was the application's fault, but that didn't exactly solve the problem.

jlinkels

Hi there,

I can assure you, there are very few that don't, and have the date format hard-coded instead.

No, there isn't.

You hit the nail on the head. Actually, configuring these things through locales has been the normal way in Unix/Linux for many years. I have to agree, though, that the Windows approach is more comfortable and easier to handle, and you can set each regional detail separately without being connected with others, and especially KDE has always tried to imitate Windows to some extent. That's how it seems, anyway.

I guess that applications specifically designed for KDE (most of them having names starting with 'K') do take KDE's regional settings into account, and other, non-KDE-aware applications just rely on the default system locale as they always have.

Oops. That's strange, because it's exactly as you stressed: en_DK means English language with Danish regional features.
To get a grip on things: What's the output of the 'locale' command on your system? - It should print a list of about a dozen individual settings, but en_DK should appear nowhere else but in the LC_TIME line.

[X] Doc CPU

Honestly, I don't recall. It is not on the machine I am working on now. I use various machines here and there, at home, in the office, the main laptop, the new laptop and the spare laptop. It happened on one of those machines, and in a calendar or project management type application.

Since you just answered one of my other questions (about accented characters in LibreOffice) you'll understand why I really don't want to mess around with system wide locales. Life is difficult enough as it is

jlinkels