[Xfce-bugs] [Bug 16527] Thunar's default format for file date should be yyyy-mm-dd hh-mm-ss (similar to ISO-8601)

[bugzilla-daemon at xfce.org]

https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16527

Adalbert.Hanssen at gmx.de changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
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                URL|                            |WONTFIX

--- Comment #2 from Adalbert.Hanssen at gmx.de ---
Many numerical date forms can create confusion when used in international
correspondence, particularly when abbreviating the year to its final two
digits, with no context. The US notation and the French one both use slashes as
separators. Therefore American and French dates are prone to be misunderstood!

In most parts of the world (including the United Nations and all Patent
offices) the "little endian" (day leftmost, year right most) format is
customary as it is in many languages. Most international users apply a dot as
separator, unfortunately the French use a slash for that. Unfortunately little
endian date formats don't sort easily if expressend in textual form.

ISO and some countries (standard in East Asia, Iran, Lithuania, Hungary, and
Sweden; and some other countries to a limited extent) use "big endian format"
where the year is leftmost. If there is a separator, a minus sign is used for
it. Such a date is easily recognized by this formatting (although in ISO there
is alos a reduced form without dashes). If the separators are used consistently
and if the number of digits for the day is not degenerated to a single one this
format is the one where lexical order is the logical order.

Only in US and Canadian non-government use the M/D/YY-format is customary (the
British stopped to do so around the middle of last century, Canada is in the
transit from American date towards ISO notation). In the US the slash is
customary as separator.

In France little endian is used with slashes: they will locate 9/11/06 (for a
German 9.11.06) on 2006-11-09, whereas an American reader would locate it on
2006-09-11!

By the way, this site uses ISO-Formatting of time stamps to be unambiguously
understood all around the world!

Some Unixers however express dates in the discordian notation - well understood
only among conspirators. 

I don't think it would be difficult to make Thunar's fourth choice the default
one such that dates shown in Thunar on a system from a live stick or on a
freshly installed system will be understood by everyone!

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