Comment 56 for bug 391572

OK, I'm late joining in on this bug, but it's annoyed me for many years.

I thought I understood what was really going on here, but it appears I don't.
Here's me being as clear as I can be:

- I want ISO 8601 dates in OO Calc. I want to be able to *edit cells* in ISO
8601.

- According to the "this is not a bug" camp, when editing date values OO uses
the system locale.

- I edited my system locale files to use ISO 8601 for en_GB (my preferred
locale), ran locale-gen, and logged off and back on.

- Other programs are using ISO 8601 now, so I think I did it correctly.

- OO Calc is still using the original en_GB date format! (At least it's not
en_US...)

So, either I've missed something while editing my locale files, or OpenOffice
is using its own copies of the various locales. I really hope that's not the
case, and I fervently hope that that's not by design if it is. Doesn't that
completely break how locales are supposed to work?

Can someone help me out here? WHAT DO I NEED TO DO TO GET ISO 8601 DATES IN
CELL EDITING?

And more importantly, WHAT DO I NEED TO DO TO GET IT IN ENGLISH?

If this is not a bug, answer those two questions, please. If there is no way to
get ISO 8601 in English, THAT IS A BUG. End of debate, and someone needs to fix
it.

(BTW, I already tried setting OO to Hungarian -- it has a two-digit year, so
that won't do. Lithuanian... well, we'll see. I was amused to see that in the
default format, today's date comes out as "2010 metų birželio mėnesio 6 diena".)

It also bears pointing out that in various places in the OO user interface,
dates are shown in American format regardless of the program or system locale
(have a look at the Calc > Calculate options, for instance). That might explain
some of the deafness this bug appears to be falling on - the developers are
comfortable with month-day-year, and don't understand why anyone would want
anything else.

So, here's a brief list of things ISO 8601 can do that month-day-year can't:

- be unambiguous.

- sort lexicographically (e.g. 2009-02-13 comes before 2010-01-13 even when
you're sorting as text, whereas m-d-y would give you ).

- avoid y2k problems (a lot of people using m-d-y still seem to write only two
digits for the year -- which is part of this bug, too).

- be consistent with how you write times -- larger units go in front of smaller
ones. You wouldn't like a watch that formatted minutes:seconds:hours, so why
would write your dates that way?

- if you only care about the year and month, or only the year, you can chop off
the rest and it's still unambiguous: 2010-06, or 2010.

Give it a try; you might like it. (But you might have to fix this bug first if
you want to try it in OpenOffice ;) )