Re: Dates in coreutils with zh_CN (simplified chinese) locales

[Pádraig Brady]

On 22/03/16 14:28, Ondřej Vašík wrote:
> Hi,
> as reported in https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1319594 , ls
> -lh shows unexpected date format in simplified chinese.
>
> When user executes "ls -lh" in Simplified Chinese locale, the output is:
> $ ls -lh
> 总用量 168K
> -rw-rw-r--. 1 guest guest 165K 3月  21 14:27 coreutils.po
>
> He expects it to be
> Expected results:
> 总用量 168K
> -rw-rw-r--. 1 guest guest 165K 3月21日 14:27 coreutils.po
>
> Command ls uses "%b %e %H:%M" format for dates. %b means locale abbreviated 
> name of month
> , %e means space padded day of month (no locales mentioned there). This may be 
> the reason,
> but I'm not sure what's the upstream position here.
>
> In addition, when using
> LC_ALL=zh_CN date , it shows the "month" chinese letter there as expected - 
> using nl_langinfo().

Yes date(1) picks the higher level date_fmt which hardcodes the desired 
character:

$ LC_TIME=zh_CN.utf8 locale date_fmt
%Y年 %m月 %d日 %A %H:%M:%S %Z

> What's your opinion? Where should we request such change (if anywhere)?
> glibc? Coreutils translation project? Or not really a bug?

ls translates the "%b %e %H:%M" (new files) and "%b %e  %Y" (old files),
so it would be supported by providing the appropriate translation
to the zh team at translationproject.org. I can see it's not translated 
currently using:

$ LC_MESSAGES=zh_CN.utf8 gettext coreutils "%b %e %H:%M"
%b %e %H:%M

In the mean time one can override the defaults with:

export TIME_STYLE='+%b%e日  %Y
%b%e日 %H:%M'

cheers,
Pádraig.