change evolution list time to 24 hour format

Thanks for the question. This is an evolution issue.

See: https://bugs.launchpad.net/evolution/+bug/48128

Regards

Phil

You can adjust that by going (in Evolution) to Edit, Preferences, Calendar and Tasks, General tab.

How the time is displayed is not a matter of fashion but rather one of personal preference. Thankfully there is a choice.

Correction:

That does not seem to work.

It seems this is a standing problem in evolution with no cure at the moment. I'll keep watching this space!

Well, yes, it is a problem in Evolution. Sort of. Evolution uses your locale to determine how to display date & time. Of course, this may be a problem if you want something different than what your locale states... But Evolution, strictly speaking, is correct, although I do not like it... I think we should be free to set what we want. On the other hand, there *is* a bug opened upstream on that, but it has not been worked on yet.

You can still force it, though: the en_DK locale is known to format date/time in ISO 8601; although Evolution will still not format the date as excepted, the time will be in 24:00 format. I myself use it. This has been discussed in the evolution-hackers mailing list some times, already.

So... if you export (before starting Evolution) the environment variable LC_TIME=en_DK.UTF-8, Evolution will show times in 24 format.

For reference, this is my personal locale data (on a terminal, type in 'locale' to find yours):

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME=en_DK.UTF-8 <=== this is out of the en.US locale!
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

So I am set in the US locale, except for tiime...

While I agree with hggdh that programs should follow a global setting I would like to set this global setting myself. Particularly with this annoying 12h time format.
<rant>I can see no sense at all in this 12hr format it is as useless as the date with the month in the front position... but what about a 6-10-8 time format sleep-work-leisure</rant>

damn missed my question...

Who does decide how these locals are set? while reading the bug reports someone said that in Britain all public clocks show 24h format... so why would the local setting for en_GB have 12h.

Same applies for en_AU where most times are in 24h

This is set by the locale facility, a piece of the GNU LibC (GLIBC). So, I guess, the GNU LIBC maintainers would be the ones to have, er, decided.

>> Thankfully there is a choice.

Hopefully there will be one in Ubuntu as standard.

More hopefully everyone's choice will be ISO 8601 in the very near future.

I am still looking for a solution to this issue.
Date and time formats should simply never be forced upon by hardcoding it in programs or developing software.

Changing the locale to en_DK.UTF-8 is NO solution.

Cheers,
Peter

@Peter:

> Hopefully there will be one in Ubuntu as standard.
>>> Thankfully there is a choice

Yes, indeed, the locale settings. So, you want a second standard, a brand new one, or that everybody get to use ISO6801?

> More hopefully everyone's choice will be ISO 8601 in the very near future.

Using ISO6801 is -- as far as writing down a date/time for my personal usage goes -- my _personal_ choice. Nevertheless, not everybody would feel comfortable with it. And replacing <whatever you have in your locale> by ISO6801 is as arbitrary as just using <whatever you have in your locale>. If you do not agree with <whatever you have in your locale>, please take it with your ISO national representatives.

If you need a solution, please go upstream, and provide the maintainers with a patch. If the patch is well-written, does not force on the user *any* other standard (even ISO6801), and does not break Evo, it will be accepted. I can see such a patch: it defaults to the locale settings, but allows the user to select *any* formatting for date and/or time.

By the way, I never said changing the time format to en_DK.UTF8 was a solution.

Still, it's my opinion...
If I could grasp the whole thing, I would write code to just do that, but unfortunately I can't
Forcing the rest of the world to look at m/d/y/ is definitely not an option and should be banned inside the code used to create a program. The choice should be left to the user, not the developer. In this particular case I still look for a solution on getting Ubuntu to understand that my Dutch standard d/m/y format is not what I want, neither in Ubuntu nor in Evolution, nor in any other program.
I have put it on the wish list as so many others already did and I just hope, by posting this in different fora to get an ear for it.
BTW it's 8601 not 6801 and this is just part of the spec.

In Windows I can specify what date format I want to use, regardless of the country I happen to have used in the setup of the OS in a fairly simple way. In Ubuntu and in Evo I cannot.

I do not disagree. My personal preference is that timestamping should be *always* an user's choice. The system may impose a *default* ordering, like what Ubuntu (and pretty much all Linux distros), and most of *IX, and last, but not the least, Windows. What Windows has different is that you can set the locale *and* immediately override it, by selecting specific display formats for date & time, at the same place. On Gnome (and, perhaps, also on KDE, I do not know) all you can set is the locale. So, the bypass I offered.

Also, many applications will allow one to play with the formating. Unfortunately, Evolution still does not allow for that. In your case, and on my case, this is bothersome, but we have bypasses. There are other cases where this gets even worse, like for people with learning disabilities, where changing the date or time formatting is a real problem (for example, Evo's usage of 'today' and 'yesterday' in lieu of the actual date).

Some other applications will simply disregard the user preference, even when explicitly set. Of course, these are clear, and unquestionably, bugs. Here, some do not see it as bugs...

There are some bugs upstream about it (and I am just talking about Evo). For whatever reason, this has never been considered a priority.

But. You point is well put, and perhaps we can raise the awareness. Perhaps one way is to tag such bugs as Usability bugs -- which is correct, since they *are* usability bugs (to my understanding, at least), and since these bugs tend to get more attention.

(BTW: blame my 6801 vs. 8601 to my dyslexia. At least I did get it right on previous posts ;-)

Well, I did some digging in the nl_NL file and after having figured out what all these "<U00nn>" codes mean, I replaced the whole d_t_fmt to date_fmt lines from the en_DK file in it, as that states ISO 8301 in an extra comment line. Now, Ubuntu and Evo still use the same date format but, as this is a KDE application, Krusader (a two panel file manager) at least shows the date the way I want to have it.. I still have to test other apps but I already noticed that the date command in the terminal puts the year at the end of the line. I think I will keep on digging for a while.

Yes I agree with reporting this as a bug and OK about switching the numbers:-)
Cheers,
Peter

I don't understand all this too much, but why does Evolution not look at what the OS is set to, in my case d/m/y and 24h and do the same? If I have set my OS to that it highly probable that that is what I want to see!!!

Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: <email address hidden> [mailto:<email address hidden>] On Behalf Of C de-Avillez
Sent: 01 August 2009 20:12
To: <email address hidden>
Subject: Re: [Question #43676]: change evolution list time to 24 hour format

Your question #43676 on evolution in ubuntu changed:
https://answers.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evolution/+question/43676

C de-Avillez proposed the following answer:
I do not disagree. My personal preference is that timestamping should be
*always* an user's choice. The system may impose a *default* ordering,
like what Ubuntu (and pretty much all Linux distros), and most of *IX,
and last, but not the least, Windows. What Windows has different is that
you can set the locale *and* immediately override it, by selecting
specific display formats for date & time, at the same place. On Gnome
(and, perhaps, also on KDE, I do not know) all you can set is the
locale. So, the bypass I offered.

Also, many applications will allow one to play with the formating.
Unfortunately, Evolution still does not allow for that. In your case,
and on my case, this is bothersome, but we have bypasses. There are
other cases where this gets even worse, like for people with learning
disabilities, where changing the date or time formatting is a real
problem (for example, Evo's usage of 'today' and 'yesterday' in lieu of
the actual date).

Some other applications will simply disregard the user preference, even
when explicitly set. Of course, these are clear, and unquestionably,
bugs. Here, some do not see it as bugs...

There are some bugs upstream about it (and I am just talking about Evo).
For whatever reason, this has never been considered a priority.

But. You point is well put, and perhaps we can raise the awareness.
Perhaps one way is to tag such bugs as Usability bugs -- which is
correct, since they *are* usability bugs (to my understanding, at
least), and since these bugs tend to get more attention.

(BTW: blame my 6801 vs. 8601 to my dyslexia. At least I did get it right
on previous posts ;-)

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Ooops, now I did it myself 8301 instead of 8601 typo's are quickly made and ever to be spotted after one hits the send button...

@Seadart: yes, this is an issue on Evo, and upstream does have a bug (or some) for it in need of love. But the issue goes farther than that: even if I live in the US, I would still like to have my dates in YYYY-MM-DD format, and the time in 24 hour format....

Upstream has bug http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=205137 that will probably solve it all (we can hope). This *should* be available for Evolution 2.28 (Karmic).