Date bug in Thunderbird 53beta1 and 54

Discussion about official Mozilla Thunderbird builds
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mgagnonlv
Posts: 848
Joined: February 12th, 2005, 8:33 pm

Date bug in Thunderbird 53beta1 and 54

Post by mgagnonlv »

Hello,

I have no idea if this bug has already been flagged or not as I have never succeded in understanding how bugzilla works...

I use Thunderbird in French on Windows 10 French (Canada). My system configuration shows dates as aaaa-mm-dd HH:mm.

With Thunderbird 52, a message dated for today appears only with the time. A message from the day – or week – before appears with a date that looks like "2017-05-09 21:00"

Alas, even though I haven't changed my system configuration, with Thunderbird 53, the date appears as "17-05-09 21:00". I tried very briefly TB 54 (i.e. Earlybird), and the issue is even worst as the date appears either as "17/5/9 21:00" or as "5/9/17 21:00". The same date issues are in the list of messages and in the calendar.

I find this issue not only annoying but downright confusing as here in Québec, we tend to see all three date numbering systems around: aaaa-mm-dd (mostly in French documents, but also in some English ones), mm/dd/aaaa (in most English documents – typically without century if the document comes from U.S), and dd/mm/aaaa or dd-mm-aaaa (in half the French documents ; sometimes without the century). Therefore, 5/9/17 (without century) can really mean "5 September 2017", "May 9, 2017" or "September 17th, 2005". Ouch!
Michel Gagnon
Montréal (Québec, Canada)
HN_FIN
Posts: 251
Joined: July 28th, 2005, 2:12 pm
Location: Finland

Re: Date bug in Thunderbird 53beta1 and 54

Post by HN_FIN »

Possibly related to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1344594 that already made me to switch away from Earlybird even before Aurora/Earlybird channel was killed. Apparently the user's region settings in OS are now ignored and just the locale of the installed Thunderbird version has impact.

Pretty blunt comment in that bug:
The date/times in the Date/Received column which are formatted using C++ code in intl/locale/DateTimeFormat.cpp will now respect "language-matched" operating system set date and time formats.

What does "language-matched" mean? It means it will only respect OS setting for locales that match the language of the Thunderbird build.

Examples:
If you install an en-US Daily, you can set the locale to en-US, en-AU or en-GB and adjust the formats. If you set the locale to de-DE, those setting will be ignored.

The reason behind it is that the application should always look properly localised, so you cannot show German dates in an otherwise English application.

This is a decision Mozilla have taken, so please no discussion on that.


If you want to get German dates, use a localised version which is also available on all channels:
Daily, Aurora, Beta, Release.
mgagnonlv
Posts: 848
Joined: February 12th, 2005, 8:33 pm

Re: Date bug in Thunderbird 53beta1 and 54

Post by mgagnonlv »

Thanks for the information.

Anyway, to show the silliness of their decision.

1. As far as I know, people in France tend to write dates as dd-mm-yyyy, i.e. with 4 digits for the year.
2. I think French-speaking Swiss, Luxembourgians and Belgians use the similar order, but with periods between each element (dd.mm.yyyy)
3. We, French-speaking Canadians, have an official date configuration which is yyyy-mm-dd. Windows, Macintoshes and most Linux systems offer specific regional parameters for each of these countries and regions.

Alas, it means that unless Thunderbird starts offering many more localized versions (ex.: 5 different French versions for various regions with different parameters), we will be stuck.

Guess it means that we're stuck with version 52.x for ever...

(P.S., I'm not shooting the messenger).
Michel Gagnon
Montréal (Québec, Canada)
HN_FIN
Posts: 251
Joined: July 28th, 2005, 2:12 pm
Location: Finland

Re: Date bug in Thunderbird 53beta1 and 54

Post by HN_FIN »

Yeah, it is silly and also the response is pretty sad, as it implicates that user feedback is not welcome...
This is a decision Mozilla have taken, so please no discussion on that.
DN123ABC
Posts: 695
Joined: January 9th, 2017, 10:10 am

Re: Date bug in Thunderbird 53beta1 and 54

Post by DN123ABC »

HN_FIN wrote:Yeah, it is silly and also the response is pretty sad, as it implicates that user feedback is not welcome...
This is a decision Mozilla have taken, so please no discussion on that.
Wait, I thought Mozilla was supposed to be software determined, and created by and for "the people". Is this now a closed group?
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DanRaisch
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Joined: September 23rd, 2004, 8:57 pm
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Re: Date bug in Thunderbird 53beta1 and 54

Post by DanRaisch »

No, it's not a closed group but it was also never totally designed based on user preferences. That's just a pipe dream as, with the number of users involved, there would never be complete unanimity on what the perfect design would be. Nor would there be enough resources to guarantee that every option for every function could be included in the configuration. Five different requirements for the French language version alone! At some point, just to get product out the door, some one has to make a decision on design and that means that others are going to disagree, because it wasn't the decision they would have made.
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