Clock shows 12 hour format in locales that do not support it

[Guy Van Sanden]

Binary package hint: gdm

The New GDM in Karmic shows the time without AM/PM suffix because my locale defaults to 24-hour time (which is correct), yet it uses the 12-hour timeschale (showing 6:00 instead of the expected 18:00 or at least 6:00 PM).

This is both with the en_DK locale I use to get the English language but 24-hour time and the Euro symbol as the Dutch_Belgium locale I installed on other systems.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
CheckboxSubmission: 1ae7a1f14f02ba41dc1cc8734f40a3bc
CheckboxSystem: faa41606b77ca9613dad823b5abbd8a8
Date: Thu Sep 24 11:47:14 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
Package: gdm 2.28.0-0ubuntu4
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_DK.UTF-8
 LANG=en_DK.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-10.35-generic
SourcePackage: gdm
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-10-generic i686

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

thank you for your bug report, not confirming the issue there on another locale though

[jbatista (jmnbatista)]

I confirm the same is happening for locale pt_PT (Portugal): hour format is showing 12-hour format instead of 24-hour format. One a Gnome session, the hour format is shown correctly.

[Niels Kristian Bech Jensen (nkbjensen)]

I can confirm this bug on the en_DK locale which should give a 24h clock but shows a 12h clock on the login screen.

[Pascal S (pascal.s)]

Confirmed with fr_FR locale on Fedora 12 (gnome 2.28 as in Karmic).

[Arnold_Layne (kostet)]

Architecture: i386
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: gdm 2.28.1-0ubuntu2.1
PackageArchitecture: i386
ProcEnviron:
 SHELL=/bin/bash
 LANG=ru_RU.UTF-8
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31
Uname: Linux 2.6.31.6-rt19-dx73-c i686
UserGroups: adm admin audio cdrom fuse plugdev video

[Arnold_Layne (kostet)]

also, look at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gdm/+bug/449198

[Alexey Balmashnov (a.balmashnov)]

After short investigation... GDM implementation of clock-widget does not use format-string defined for time in locale. Instead it uses hard-coded, although translatable, format string for clock output.

Therefore for now problem may be solved by properly adapting translations of the original format strings for time and datetime. There are two in gdm.po:
msgid "%l:%M %p"
msgid "%l:%M:%S %p"

Date format string may be also of interest:
msgid "%a %b %e"

Better solution would be to use appropriate format strings defined in locale. Since there might be justification for current choice, I do not know how feasible it is.