id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	priority	milestone	component	version	resolution	keywords	cc	blockedby	blocking	branch_state	votes
1767	Custom/locale-based date format	gotar	bilbo	"MTime in panels since always is displayed as:

MMM dD  YYYY
MMM dD hh:mm

where:

MMM=abmon
dD=day of month (1 or 2 digits)
YYYY=year
hh:mm=time (24h clock)

This leads to several issues:

1. obviously MDY order us english-centrific - and illogical, as we don't give e.g. time in hours-seconds-minutes order. For example in polish (language grammar) the only official order is DMY, and YMD is allowed for computer systems (as international ISO-8601 format). Of course having dD MMM hh:mm (when displaying newer files in which case YYYY is replaced with time) would be not so illogical too.

2. not all languages even have their own official abmons and abdays (like polish). Just take a look at:

http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=3156
http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4789
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=242296

so current glibc abmons are allowed but not official.

2a. even if abmons are defined, it's bad assumption that they have the same length. For example when glibc team had changed polish to roman numbers (I, II, ... VIII...) there were problems like mentioned here:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=243513

Fortunately this change was eventually reverted and so now we have:

$ LC_TIME=pl_PL locale -k d_fmt abmon t_fmt abday d_t_fmt
d_fmt=""%d.%m.%Y""
abmon=""sty;lut;mar;kwi;maj;cze;lip;sie;wrz;paź;lis;gru""
t_fmt=""%T""
abday=""nie;pon;wto;śro;czw;pią;sob""
d_t_fmt=""%a, %-d %b %Y, %T""

I think date and time format should be configurable directly by strftime format string with an option to simply follow d_t_fmt. Length of such string could be calculated cycling through all format elements or explicitly given."	enhancement	closed	minor	4.7.1	mc-core	4.7.0-pre4	fixed						committed-master