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21

Short correction on the introduction of the format:
in [1] (sorry, it is in German) it is stated that ISO8601 “as the only allowed numeric format” was introduced in Germany in 1996-05-01 (May 1, 1996), i.e. more than 27 years ago…
And Linux is still sticking to the old format. Shall I laugh or cry? :slight_smile:

[1] ISO8601 in DE

22

I think your memory is correct. The toolkit of course is Qt.
Although I don’t fully understand, because Qt has a very good support of ISO8601. I am using it many times…

But the developers just don’t want to do something about it. Plasma6 would be a good opportunity to introduce the date/time format like Windows (!!!), where this is possible without problems.

23

Yes, I saw that and, that the resistance from the population could not be ignored – even then – without too much in the way of “Social Media” …

  • I wonder what would happen today with the platforms available to a large proportion of the population –
    Probably a never-ending shit-storm from the “never change a running system” fraternity …

I’ll risk a KDE Bug Report … :imp:

24

Ich drücke die Daumen!

25

The KDE folks have answered:

DD.MM.YYYY is significantly more common in germany than YYYY-MM-DD and we don’t have to adhere to standards.

If you want a different date format on your machine, you can change it locally.

  • “significantly more common” ???

OK, OK – the German DIN Standards are often “Recommendations” and, DIN 5008 is indeed such a Recommendation – for the writing and layout of text produced by machines.

  • The standard began with the definition of the layout of text produced on typewriters and, is currently a definition of text layout produced by Word Processing applications.
    In the March 2020 version typewriters are no longer mentioned but, the rest defines how German offices shall layout their documents …

So, what now?

  1. A legal process to force the issue would probably not succeed – a recommendation of how to layout office documents ain’t law …
  2. Raise a petition to express the opinion of the “silent majority”?
  3. Simply accept that, the majority of the German citizens will not accept the change, mainly because –
    „That’s not what they learnt at school.”
    We’ll have to wait until everyone aged 16 and over has died off …
26

That is new to me. I would like to know how it can be changed in KDE (I do not understand the “on your machine”, it is about the KDE desktop and thus personal for every user, not about “the machine”).

27

Currently, only the use of “en_SE.UTF-8” as the time format in the KDE Plasma settings.

28

That is my by-pass also, but that is not what the answer in your bug report suggests in my opinion.

But, let it go, it is rather useless to talk to these KDE people, at least about this and a few other subjects :frowning:

29

@jke61:

At least for “ls” and possibly other CLI commands, setting the Environment Variable “TIME_STYLE” seems to be the only reasonable method – the Bash Environment Variable “TIMEFORMAT” only deals with the timing information for pipelines …

And, the Environment Variable “LC_TIME” only defines a Locale to be used.

Back to the root cause – the “de_DE.UTF-8” Locale –

  • One of the alternatives I considered, was to raise a Bug Report against the Locale but, where?

Many applications – including CLI commands – have seen the need to support ISO 8601 in one way or another but, the de_DE.UTF-8 system default date format is still that from before May 1996 …

How to proceed?

  1. An openSUSE Bug Report?
  2. Petition our local MPs?
    If the current school children aren’t being taught the ISO 8601 date format, we’ll have to wait until THEY die off …
30

Merge en_DK LCTIME date definitions into de_DE and create your own locale de_DC (short for @dcurtisfra):

% date formats following ISO 8601-1988
d_t_fmt  "%Y-%m-%dT%T %Z"
date_fmt "%Y-%m-%dT%T %Z"
d_fmt    "%Y-%m-%d"
t_fmt    "%T"
am_pm    "";""
t_fmt_ampm  ""
week    7;19971130;4
first_weekday 2
END LC_TIME
31

Hi Thanks,
sorry to have one more question. How do I make this known to Plasma?
I have followed your instruction (from hte forums.kde site), but Plasma doesn’t know of my new locale…

Thank you,
Johannes

32

Plasma reads .config/plasma-localerc:

karl@3400g:~> cat .config/plasma-localerc 
[Formats]
LANG=de_DE.UTF-8

[Translations]
LANGUAGE=en_GB:de
karl@3400g:~>
33

Na ja, it is true that the DIN are recommendation, but the LEGAL situation with the time format in Germany is:
It is law! that you have to use this format in official communication. Ok, there is a paragraph in this law, that states, that as long you make sure your counterpart knows what you want, you can use ANY format… :slight_smile:

I am wondering, how the KDE developer make sure the counterpart always knows what the originator wants… :slight_smile:

In general I agree with one of the posters here, who recommends to let it go. Already the statement “you can set it locally” is so user unfriendly (because it is not easy at all), that I know, it doesn’t make sense to go on.

34

Hello thanks,
but it still doesn’t work for me. I followed the instructions in your post on forums.kde and I named my locale de_SI.UTF-8.
My .config/plasma-loaclerc is:

johannes@JohannesOffice:~> cat .config/plasma-localerc
[Formats]
LANG=de_SI.UTF-8

[Translations]
LANGUAGE=de:en_US
35

You need to logout from the KDE session and login again.

36

Hi,
sorry for bothering again. I even rebooted and still no effect…
However I have seen the file ~/.config/plasma-locale-settings.sh, which is:

# Generated script, do not edit
# Exports language-format specific env vars from startkde.
# This script has been generated from kcmshell5 formats.
# It will automatically be overwritten from there.
export LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
export LANGUAGE=de:en_US

Do you have any idea, if this has an effect, and if yes, how to change it? According to the comment it doesn’t sense to edit it, because it will be overwritten…

I have rebooted the computer.
I also want to thank you for doing this effort and answering so quick!

Thanks,
Johannes

37

KDE does not use POSIX locale. KDE (or more correctly Qt) is using CLDR; the settings that you are trying to modify are the approximation of CLDR database for POSIX. You cannot define something that does not exist in CLDR and the whole database is statically compiled into Qt.

38

Ah, thanks.

And this means that the advice from the KDE Developer to change the setting locally is a hoax…

OMG…

39

I don’t have ~/.config/plasma-locale-settings.sh:

karl@3400g:~> find .config -type f -name plasma*
.config/kde.org/plasmashell.conf
.config/plasma-nm
.config/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc.saved
.config/plasma_calendar_holiday_regions
.config/plasmanotifyrc
.config/plasmarc
.config/kdedefaults/plasmarc
.config/plasma-pk-updates
.config/plasmawindowedrc
.config/plasmawindowed-appletsrc
.config/plasma-localerc
.config/plasmashellrc
.config/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc
karl@3400g:~>

Get rid of .config/plasma-locale-settings.sh and try again. KDE sessions on host 3400g readily use what you specify in file .config/plasma-localerc.

40

Which advice? Care to post a link?