Evolution always shows 12-hour am/pm time in email summary screen

Bug #48128 reported by alistair
32
This bug affects 2 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Evolution
Confirmed
Wishlist
gnome-control-center (Ubuntu)
Triaged
Wishlist
Ubuntu Desktop Bugs

Bug Description

Setting locale en_GB results in time being displayed in 12-hour with AM/PM rather than 24-hour format.

In the UK, when mentioning times in conversation, the 12-hour clock is still used, but AM and PM have amlost disappeared from modern British English. Rather, something like "nine in the morning" or "four in the afternoon" would be used.

In almost all other circumstances, and almost without exception where a time is written numerically, the 24-hour clock is used, particularly where precision is important. An unusual exception is that television listings in the printed media normally use 12-hour time (without AM/PM indicator) but the same publication would use 24-hour time in a weather forecast.

In the en_GB locale, running evolution, appearance of 12-hour time with AM/PM indicator is an oddity and seems wrong in the message pane.

The panel clock can be changed to show 24-hour time, but this is not possible in evolution.

Note that selecting British English in KDE sets 24-hour time by default.

Revision history for this message
Leo Howell (leo-howell) wrote :

Thanks for the bug report.

This is a problem with evolution. You can track this bug and make comments here:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=350825

Changed in evolution:
status: Unknown → Unconfirmed
Changed in evolution:
assignee: nobody → desktop-bugs
Revision history for this message
Lee Maguire (leemaguire) wrote :

Upstream has this marked as NOTABUG/RESOLVED since it's using LC_TIME.

This is therefore, I guess, a ubuntu/distro bug. I always want to use the 24-hour time format, but apparently en_GB defaults to 12-hour
(for some reason - how is that decided?) and I'm not presented with any options for that.

Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

There is no distribution specific change, if there is a bug that's an upstream one

Revision history for this message
Lee Maguire (leemaguire) wrote :

The bug is not in Evolution as such, it's that there's apparently no easy way to tweak environment-wide settings such as LC_TIME in gnome/ubuntu.

The upstream ticket for the Evolution specific issue is
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=332190

A gnome-control-center feture request for this is
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=333104

Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

That's not really a bug and nothing specific to Ubuntu, evolution could still allow to change the format rather than using the LC_TIME environment variable

Changed in evolution:
status: Confirmed → Triaged
Revision history for this message
Lee Maguire (leemaguire) wrote :

In that case, please request that the upstream reopen the ticket #332190

Revision history for this message
Dean Sas (dsas) wrote :

It seems to me that there are two issues here:
1. There is no GNOME-wide way of changing the values of LC_TIME (the bug I linked and referenced by Leo Howell)
2. The default LC_TIME settings for en_GB suck (contentious)

Lets continue to use this bug for 1., if you'd like the default settings for 2. to change please open a bug and report it to the upstream developers (glibc developers?)

As a work around you can add "export LC_TIME=en_DK.UTF8" in your .bashrc file, this will give you 24 hour clock time everywhere that respects the LC_TIME locale.

Changed in evolution:
importance: Medium → Wishlist
Changed in evolution:
status: Unknown → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Seadart (chris-dart) wrote :

Hi all,

Thanks for the comments. The panel runs as I require in 24 hr with locale set to GB - everything else runs in 24 hr including my other mail programme - Thunderbird, it is only the listing in evolution's mail box that has the difference. Showing the individual mail in is own window also shows a 24 hr time.

As I said earlier I am new to Ubuntu so please excuse me if I put my foot in it! Following Dean's advise above I did a search for .bashrc and found 4 of them; 2 dot.bashrc and 2 bash.bashrc Three of them are dated Oct 2007 and one of the bash.baschrc is dated April 2008 (with 24 hour CEST time!!!!) The only one with relevant contents is one of the dot.bashrc files which is dated last year and does not reflect what my system is doing. I paste a bit of it here:

# Written by John Zaitseff and released into the public domain.

# Variable settings for your convenience

export LANG=en_AU.UTF-8 # We are in Australia
export LC_ALL=en_AU.UTF-8
export TIME_STYLE=$'+%b %e %Y\n%b %e %H:%M' # As used by ls(1)

I changed the time in the last month in the logon options and I would expect the file to show a change date to match.

Dean, do you mean I should paste the export line you gave below the piece I pasted above?

Chris

Revision history for this message
Dean Sas (dsas) wrote :

Chris,
Yes. The file should be .bashrc in your home directory. You'll need to log in/out to see the difference.

Revision history for this message
sebastian-s (sebastian-s) wrote :

Myself as well thinks that this is an issue which should be taken care off. I would not mind having an option in evolution to change this (that is not following the local setting).

$ locale
LANG=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

with
~$ export LC_TIME=en_DK.UTF-8 && evolution
I get 24h view but many error messagen in the cli as well

(evolution:26869): gtkhtml-editor-WARNING **: lc: No such language
(evolution:26869): Gtk-WARNING **: GtkSpinButton: setting an adjustment with non-zero page size is deprecated

Revision history for this message
C de-Avillez (hggdh2) wrote :

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).

I will wait to reset the upstream task until I am sure of it.

Revision history for this message
Bruce Cowan (bruce89-deactivatedaccount) wrote :

AFAIK, this is no longer an issue.

Changed in evolution:
importance: Unknown → Low
Changed in evolution:
importance: Low → Wishlist
Changed in evolution:
status: Confirmed → Incomplete
Changed in evolution:
status: Incomplete → Confirmed
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