Honor locale time settings in lock screen.

[bk2204]

The time display in the lock screen should honor the LC_TIME variable,
including the locale-specific settings for whether to display a 12-hour or
24-hour time. Sending the time and date strings through gettext results in
a value which is specific to LC_MESSAGES, which can be different from
LC_TIME. Use the %X value for a time, which is guaranteed to be appropriate
for the locale in question.

In my particular case, I use UTC for my system time even though I live in the United States, so a 12-hour time is not very useful to me. I set LC_TIME to POSIX and LC_MESSAGES (and all the rest of the locale variables) to en_US.UTF-8, so passing the locale strings through gettext breaks things for me. Assuming people set their locales correctly, everything should just work.

[stefano-k]

But please keep it translatable (and keep comments for translators)

[bk2204]

I don't think you quite understand. Keeping it translatable means that the translation string is looked up using LC_MESSAGES. So if the French translator uses something other than "%X" for the time, then the code doesn't honor LC_TIME anymore when LC_MESSAGES=fr_FR.UTF-8, and it's broken.

There's never a reason for the LC_MESSAGES setting or any translator to modify this, so it shouldn't be translatable. The code should always honor LC_TIME.

[stefano-k]

So you have to change "%A, %B %e" to "%x"

[sunweaver]

Hi Stefano,

any progress on the LC_TIME issue? I agree with Brian that the logic is in strftime() and the locale should handle the correct TIME and DATE layout. The translator teams should not be bugged with the correct translation of time/date strings.

And using the translations here indeed fails for LC_TIME=POSIX.

Mike

[sunweaver]

Hi all,

I have just uploaded mate-screensaver 1.8.0-5 to Debian unstable including this patch.

I have tested it and it works as expected. Thanks Brian for providing this.

@stefano-k: I highly recommend accepting this pull request.

Mike

[infirit]

Pushed with debbeac with small modification to use the previous date string. Using %x for the date looks awful imho.

[sunweaver]

Hi Sander,

thanks for (partly) accepting this pull request. IMHO opinion, only using %X for that date, but not using %x is a half solution to this reported issue.

For the Debian package of mate-screensaver I will keep %x and %X to fulfill the requirements of a fully locale compliant Linux distro.

[infirit]

@sunweaver using "%A, %B %e" will work perfectly fine with whatever locale setting you have, even C.

I don't like to use %x for the date as it looks horrible. This morning I realized why @stefano-k send this through gettext and reverted the commit and re-opened this PR for more discussion.

Using %X for time is ok and I see no need to send this through gettext but the date is now up for discussion.