Re: Bug#474436: coreutils: "ls --time-style=locale" no longer works

[Jim Meyering]

Eric Cooper <address@hidden> wrote:
> Package: coreutils
> Version: 6.10-3
> Severity: normal
>
> The --time-style=locale option to ls no longer behaves as documented.
>
> $ locale
> LANG=en_US.UTF-8
...
>
> $ ls --version
> ls (GNU coreutils) 6.10
> ...
>
> $ /bin/ls --time-style=locale -l passwd
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 765 2007-12-07 12:42 passwd
>
> It worked fine in version 5.97:
>
> $ ls --version
> ls (GNU coreutils) 5.97
> ...
>
> $ /bin/ls --time-style=locale -l passwd
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 765 Dec  7 17:42 passwd

Thanks for the report.

Interestingly, that does work for any non-English locale.
>From comparing strace output with en_US and with any non-English
locale, this appears to be because coreutils doesn't provide
any English ("en") translations (fyi, actually upstream gets its
translations from translationproject.org, and they don't
have English ones).

  $ ls /usr/share/locale/en*/LC_TIME/coreutils.mo
  zsh: no matches found: /usr/share/locale/en*/LC_TIME/coreutils.mo
  [Exit 1]
  $ ls /usr/share/locale/fr/LC_TIME/coreutils.mo
  /usr/share/locale/fr/LC_TIME/coreutils.mo@

It works fine for all other locales:

    $ LC_ALL=fr_FR /bin/ls --time-style=locale -ldgo /
    drwxr-xr-x 42 1024 mar 13 12:02 /
    $ LC_ALL=de_DE /bin/ls --time-style=locale -ldgo /
    drwxr-xr-x 42 1024 13. Mär 12:02 /

A work-around, from "info coreutils ls":

          The `LC_TIME' locale category specifies the timestamp format.
          The default POSIX locale uses timestamps like `Mar 30  2002'
          and `Mar 30 23:45'; in this locale, the following two `ls'
          invocations are equivalent:

           newline='
           '
           ls -l --time-style="+%b %e  %Y$newline%b %e %H:%M"
           ls -l --time-style="locale"

Odd.  I see that with LC_ALL=en, it *does* work:

    LC_ALL=en ./ls --time-style=locale -dl /
    drwxr-xr-x 42 root root 1024 Mar 13 12:02 /

I probably won't address this for the upcoming release, but if
someone else is interested, suggestions/patches are welcome.