[Gnumed-devel] Possible solution for altering date formats (Debian)?

[Jim Busser]

I found the following at
	http://myy.helia.fi/~karte/ 
international_iso-8601_date_on_thunderbird.html

When on my en_CA machine I did the "locale -a" command I got
        C
        en_CA.utf8
        POSIX

I have not yet, in Debian, found any control panel that permits the  
user to specify or override the locale setting for the machine's (or  
the user's) default date format. So I am wondering -- I concede,  
without doing the experiment to try it, but... -- if I were to change  
my LC_TIME setting to something that uses ISO instead of POSIX, would  
that be expected to be recognized and followed by GNUmed client?
============================

Fix for Ubuntu

$ export LC_TIME=en_DK.utf8
$ mozilla-thunderbird
To fix this permanently, put the line in your $HOME/.bashrc,  
$HOME/.profile or create a shell script thunderdates and put the  
export in that.

Tested with Ubuntu Breezy Badger 5.10 and Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.7  
on 2005-12-11.

Fix for other Debian derivatives

Locale names differ on different systems. To see installed locales on  
your computer

$ locale -a
C
en_AU.utf8
en_BW.utf8
[..]
The correct locale for displaying ISO-8601 dates using LC_TIME is the  
one containing en_DK It means English in Denmark, name is probably a  
joke. Common settings are “LC_TIME=en_DK” and “LC_TIME=en_DK.utf8”.

To see locales in use,

$ locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
[..]
LC_TIME=en_DK.utf8
[..]
Future

Most of the world has already ridden itself of obsoleted units, such  
as inches and feet. I hope that soon all programs could have sensible  
defaults, for example units from the SI-system (metric system) and  
iso-8601. We still have work to do in Finland too, as some people  
still talk of “calories” (an obsolete and unclearly defined unit for  
energy) instead of using the SI-unit joule.