Date setting in the preferences should be not be shown in ISO format

Forgot to add the attachment, here it is

mpt, what's your opinion on this? I assumed the format from the spec mockups was ISO. Did you have something else in mind?

Yes, I meant ISO 8601, but David has a good point. I'll need to tweak that part.

This bug was fixed in the package indicator-datetime - 0.2.93-0ubuntu1

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indicator-datetime (0.2.93-0ubuntu1) oneiric; urgency=low

  * New upstream release.
    ∘ Use cleaner GDateTime API
    ∘ Use locale preferred date format (LP: #729056)
    ∘ Use real ellipsis (LP: #621339)
 -- Ted Gould <email address hidden> Thu, 18 Aug 2011 15:36:21 -0500

This broke the preferences panel. The code to parse the text back into a unix timestamp can only deal with yyyy-mm-dd formatted strings so this either means that the user cannot change the date (by typing) or that the date is changed to something unexpected (for example, in the case that %x produces a 2-digit year, you may find yourself in the year 0013).

I originally experimented with fixing this bug, but never commented back here. My fault.

This should not have been fixed. We can reliably format a date into a locale-specific display string. But as far as I recall, there is no way to either:
A) Programatically format a locale-specific display string back into a date
B) Or programatically query what the locale-specific display string breaks into (i.e. is "%x" really "%y-%m-%d"?)

So if we show the data in the locale-specific way, there's no way to parse it back again, when the user edits the text box. This merge has made it so that when the user tries to manually edit the date box, it will screw up the date.

I've filed bug 1149696 about this.

I'll mark this Fix Released again, I opened a new bug for the problem.

OK, so the regression that fixing this bug introduced is now fixed again. I'll re-open this bug for an eventual "real fix". It will involve actually parsing back the locale-sensitive date string. It's possible, but involves some work.

Alternatively, maybe we can make the spinbox a label, and only let the user edit it via a calendar widget or some such. Regardless. This bug can stay open until we decide how we want to improve it.

For now I've just added a one-sentence spec for the datepicker and timepicker: "The “Time:” and “Date:” fields should be locale-sensitive timepicker and datepicker controls, where Left/Right/punctuation keys navigate between segments, number keys replace the current segment, and Up/Down keys increment/decrement the current segment."

When anyone is ready to implement such delicate creatures, let me know, and I'll be glad to describe it in more detail. (Or find a Mac or Windows PC on which you can try their equivalent controls.)

Reassigning to unity-control-center, which is where the code for that panel now resides.