[Sorry if this is a duplicate; my first attempt to send this flopped I think.]
>>> * There are more users in non-English locales than in non-"C" English >>> locales, and the harm in the non-English case (incomprehensible >>> dates) is much greater than the harm in the English case >>> (comprehensible but ugly dates). >> >> Yes this is the crux of the question. > ... > Note Fedora 13 has got the inadvertent format change > ... > I estimate at least 50K en_ people have run `ls -l` and not complained: > > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/buglist.cgi?query_format=advanced&version=13&component=coreutils&product=Fedora&classification=Fedora But this doesn't address the crux of the question, as it doesn't measure either the harm in the non-English case, or the harm in the English case. Instead, it indirectly measures only the people who prefer the harmful English behavior, and it (quite understandably) reports that there are no such people. >> With the patch we have: >> no_coreutils_style_translation && wrong_sys_abmon => English month shown The damage is not just that the English month is shown. It's also that the English-style order is used for year, month, day, and time. This order is not appropriate for all languages. >> A quick check on my system shows the first condition where >> abmon is wrong, triggers for 3 locales. On my host (Ubuntu 10.04), it triggers for 6 locales: ar_SA, hy_AM, la_AU, sid_ET, tlh_GB, and ug_CN. But I don't think this info is all that important, as it doesn't address the order-of-elements issue. On thinking about it further, I guess the main problem is that the current behavior really irritates maintainers who have to deal with poorly-maintained English locales all too often. In contrast, people who have to deal with poorly-maintained non-English locales are less vociferous (in English, anyway :-) and perhaps less typical, and so do not matter so much. On those grounds, I will reluctantly admit that the change is OK. However, it needs to be documented better, in two ways. First, there should be a change to coreutils.texi that talks about this stuff. For example, the current text says "Most locales use a timestamp like @samp{2002-03-30 23:45}." which will certainly not be true after this change. Can you please prepare something along those lines? Also, the NEWS entry doesn't explain the change well. I suggest the following NEWS item instead: ls -l now uses traditional rather than ISO-style date formats in poorly-configured locales that do not specify date formats. For example, in a poorly-configured French locale, previous versions of ls -l would output a date in this ISO-style format: 2009-05-01 12:34 but newer versions will probably output one of the following: May 1 2009 mai 1 2009 mai 1 2009 depending on how poorly the locale is configured. (A properly-configured French locale would output "1 mai 2009".) The new approach has nicer behavior in poorly-configured English locales; this advantage was judged to outweigh the disadvantage of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured non-English locales. The behavior is not changed in properly-configured locales, including the default C locale. Does this sound OK?
