Re: [tlug] So-called "locale" problems in Thunderbird

[Daniel Ramaley <daniel.ramaley@example.com>]

> All I can find in Thunderbird is a bizarre choice between: "Application
> locale: English (United Kingdom)" and "Regional settings locale: English
> (Denmark)". This seems to means someting like using the "locale"
> corresponding to the "language" set in Thunderbird or using ??the system
> settings???

Most Linux applications use the system locales. Similarly to you i
think, i want en_US for most things except dates and times, which i want
formatted in the style described in ISO-8601. I used to use the en_DK as
my time locale, but some time back ran into an issue where some
applications started showing weekdays and months in Danish. Which... is
kind of what i'd told the system to do, so i couldn't fault it. But
isn't what i wanted. Eventually i ended up creating my own locale which
i named en_XX. That locale is the same as en_US, but with the time and
date formatting strings updated. This is great, everything works. Except
Thunderbird.

Thunderbird is the one application i use that does not respect the
system locales. Here's a bug report on it:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1502659

The most relevant part of that bug page is probably this:

"Mozilla does not use the platform's locale data. They only use the
 name(s) associated with the currently selected platform locale to get
 data from an internal (embedded) locale system, which is based on
 ICU/CLDR. Many Linux distros (one platform) rely on glibc for their
 locale system. Unfortunately, you cannot expect a given locale name
 to yield the same data from ICU/CLDR and glibc. Doesn't make much
 sense, but that's the current situation. And that explains why the
 appearance of date/time values is confusing users, and is not what
 they are expecting."

Basically, Thunderbird doesn't use locales and so there's no solution
right now. I used to run an extension "Enhanced Date Formatter" that
let me change Thunderbird's date/time formatting. Recent versions of
Thunderbird break that extension though and it has not been updated to
work again. I've also not found a different extension to do the same
thing. So for now i just live with Thunderbird's awful date formatting,
even though it is a constant low-level irritation.