Re: Emacs 21.1 w2k: format-time-string %b is different than in 20.7

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: jari.aalto@poboxes.com (Jari Aalto+mail.emacs)
> Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.bug
> Date: Sat, 05 Jan 2002 13:01:00 +0200
> 
> My current locale in W2k "Regional Options" is "Finnish", because
> it is the only way to use keyboard correctly.
> 
> But I do not want to see the month names in "finnish", because they
> are not abbreviated to 3 letters (like in output above).

AFAIK, this is a known problem, due to a bug in the Windows version
of strftime: it doesn't always abbreviate month names in locales
other than the US English.  I see the same problem in my locale.

> Is there any way to force Emacs use different locale settings and
> have format-time-string display Months and other time related
> names in english?

I don't know of any way except setting up your system to use the
English locale, which you obviously don't want.

You could replace strftime with something that ignores the locale, or
somehow hack Emacs sources to reset the locale just for getting time
strings, of course...

If Emacs is to work around such problems in system libraries, I think
it should call format-time-string once per session, compute the
longest month name, and then use that to align the file listings
nicely.  WOuld you like to write such a code and submit it for
inclusion in Emacs?