On Wed, Mar 31, 2021 at 09:17:26PM +0900, Olaf Meeuwissen via Dng wrote:
> Hi Dario, Adam, list,
> 
> Adam Borowski writes:
> 
> > On Tue, Mar 30, 2021 at 06:37:44PM +0200, Dario Niedermann wrote:
> >> `date` suddenly tells the time in 12-hour format, regardless of $TZ
> >> (be it empty or 'Europe/<anything>').
> >>
> >> Who told it to do that? I certainly didn't.
> >>
> >> I had already noticed this before the recent switch to DST.
> >
> > I bet your locale is set to en_US.
> >
> > This setting is used for two unrelated things:
> > * the default locale for anyone who wants English and doesn't live in
> >   Britfain or Down Under.
> > * inhabitants of a silly land to the left of a pond to the left of Europe
> >
> > The latter have weird customs like a medieval system of measurements, units
> > that differ on dry-vs-liquid-vs-slightly-moist, or different distances by
> > the same name on air vs land vs survey measurements.
> >
> > And, also, a discontinuous system of time with four non-monotonic segments
> > and ambiguous endpoints; marked with "am" and "pm".
> 
> Actually, I believe interpretation of the endpoints is locale dependent,
> so your 12am might be someone else's 0pm.  Or was that 0am the next day?
> This kind of confusion made me use a 24-hour clock (aka "military time).

I reset my personal day when I go to sleep at night.  So when I'm a 
night owl I'll cheerfully use times like 23:00, 24:00, 25:00 ..., all 
treated as part of the same day.

-- hendrik

> 
> # While I'm "ranting", I also mightily dislike times for events show in
> # local timezones.  Even with the timezone indication I'm clueless more
> # often than not and DST makes matter even worse.  Why can't organizers
> # simply use UTC?  That one everyone only needs to know the conversion
> # to their own timezone rather than being aware of 24 timezones and the
> # various DST idiosyncracies.
> # Just look at how often the `tzdata` package gets updated ...
> 
> > So in Buster (and thus Beowulf and Chimaera), meaning of "en_US" changed to
> > include that silly 12-hour time.
> >
> > Ways to fix include:
> > * C.UTF-8
> > * en_DK.UTF-8 (for some reason, only Denmark is available -- but it's
> >   identical for all ways that matter)
> 
> I have a habit of selecting "C (No localization)" in the installer and
> later installing the locales package.  After that a
> 
>   dpkg-reconfigure locales
> 
> will "fix" my system.  I select `en_GK.UTF-8` and `ja_JP.UTF-8` (and
> sometimes `nl_NL.UTF-8` too) to be generated and make `C.UTF-8` the
> system default.
> 
> My reasoning being that the system administrator should be fluent in
> C.UTF-8 and all my users (that's only me, mostly ;-) smart enough to
> configure their sessions to taste.  For my own, that's usually
> 
>   export LANG=ja_JP.UTF-8
>   export LC_MESSAGES=en_GB.UTF-8
>   export LC_COLLATE=C.UTF-8
> 
> as I prefer an English UI but want sorting to honour non-alphanumerics
> and put uppercase before lowercase when I `ls -a` :-P
> 
> BTW, in terms of available `en_*.UTF-8` locales
> 
>   $ grep en_ /etc/locale.gen | grep UTF-8
>   # en_AG UTF-8
>   # en_AU.UTF-8 UTF-8
>   # en_BW.UTF-8 UTF-8
>   # en_CA.UTF-8 UTF-8
>   # en_DK.UTF-8 UTF-8
>   en_GB.UTF-8 UTF-8
>   # en_HK.UTF-8 UTF-8
>   # en_IE.UTF-8 UTF-8
>   # en_IN UTF-8
>   # en_NG UTF-8
>   # en_NZ.UTF-8 UTF-8
>   # en_PH.UTF-8 UTF-8
>   # en_SG.UTF-8 UTF-8
>   # en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
>   # en_ZA.UTF-8 UTF-8
>   # en_ZM UTF-8
>   # en_ZW.UTF-8 UTF-8
>   # en_IL UTF-8
>   # en_SC.UTF-8 UTF-8
> 
> so there's a whole pile more than en_DK.UTF-8 but I have no idea (nor am
> I inclined to find out) how these format date/time.  When I really care
> about the formatting I often use
> 
>   date +%FT%T
> 
> or
> 
>   date +'%F %T'
> 
> for ISO-8601 compliant formatted output.  Personally, I find the latter
> more readable but it kind of sucks in file names :-)
> Of course, `date --iso-8601=seconds` will work too and will even include
> timezone info.  For UTC, just pass the `--utc` (or `-u`) option.
> 
> Hope this helps,
> --
> Olaf Meeuwissen, LPIC-2            FSF Associate Member since 2004-01-27
>  GnuPG key: F84A2DD9/B3C0 2F47 EA19 64F4 9F13  F43E B8A4 A88A F84A 2DD9
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