Ubuntu Time & Date applet should set GNOME 12/24-hour clock format

[Adam Dingle]

In GNOME, the setting /org/gnome/desktop/interface/clock-format has value "12h" or "24h" and determines whether GNOME applications such as Nautilus display 12-hour or 24-hour time. In vanilla GNOME's control center there's a Time & Date applet which lets the user set this value.

In Ubuntu's control center, the 12/24-hour control in theTime & Date applet sets a different value, namely /com/canonical/indicator/datetime/time-format. This setting determines how the clock appears in the Unity panel, but has no effect on GNOME applications.

This leads to a poor and confusing user experience. The format in the Unity panel may not match that in GNOME applications. The user has no way to control the GNOME 12/24 hour setting through the Ubuntu control center.

I think the best solution here is to eliminate /com/canonical/indicator/datetime/time-format, to let the user configure the underlying GNOME setting and to use that to decide how to display the clock in Unity.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Please note that there are flavours of Ubuntu that don't use gnome-control-center.

[Adam Dingle (adam-yorba)]

Do you mean Kubuntu, for example? Can those flavors run Unity?

If you want to keep /com/canonical/indicator/datetime/time-format for such flavors, then you could have the Ubuntu gnome-control-center set both /com/canonical/indicator/datetime/time-format and /org/gnome/desktop/interface/clock-format in parallel. I think that would probably work okay.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu... Suppose they can use indicator-datetime, at least.

Yes, setting both was my first thought as well. But don't know enough about it to be sure.

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

I believe the control panel and the gsettings schemas are only in the indicator-datetime package.

[Vanderson M. do Rosario (vandersonmr)]

I would be glad to work on it. I was think in add for the case that are in a gnome system a command to set both parameters. What do you guys think? In this way will turn a more consistent option.

[Charles Kerr (charlesk)]

I don't believe this merits the "High" importance under the guidelines of https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Bug%20importances... this doesn't have a severe impact on users, make a default Ubuntu installation generally unusable, etc.

One could argue this is a Low importance but (ie, there is an easy workaround, just use both settings).

However, these two keys aren't equivalent . clock-format is a 12h/24h toggle. time-format has those two options, and two others: (1) follow the locale default, and (2) use a custom strftime-style format string. So dropping the time-format key would regress us on those two settings, and locale-default is in fact the default setting.

I guess we could replace the 12h/24h options in clock-format with an entry 'use-clock-format', but I'm not sure that would actually help if the goal is to simplify the dconf settings :)