fr_CA locale: first day of week should be Sunday

[Sébastien Corriveau]

Since I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04, the calendar from the clock applet is showing the first day of week as Monday instead of Sunday. It was correct in Ubuntu 8.10 and earlier.

Editing "/usr/share/i18n/locales/fr_CA" to replace "week 7;19971201;4" by "week 7;19971130;4" resolved the issue (you needs to run "sudo locale-gen" after the changes).

[Fabián Rodríguez (magicfab)]

fr_CA is used in Quebec province, in Canada. In such locale the week starts on Mondays. See http://www.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/francilettre/pdf_franc8/ExtraitCCLQTI_DatesHeures.pdf

So, marking as invalid.

[Etienne Goyer (etienne-goyer-outlands)]

Fabian,

The fr_CA locale is pan-Canadian, not Québc-specific. The document being cited is from the OQLF, a Québec provincial agency. As such, we would need to confirm using a directive from the federal to be absolutely sure.

However, it is my understanding that week begins on Monday in the French locale. It is easy enough to test from the command line:

    $ LC_ALL=fr_FR.utf8 cal

So, I am not quite sure which is correct, to be honest.

[Sébastien Corriveau (sebcor-deactivatedaccount)]

As Etienne said, fr_CA is pan-canadian. So I googled the gc.ca domain in search of an official French document on which we would get a definitive answer.

I found several occurrences where the first day of week is Sunday and none where weeks starts on Monday. But, I couldn't find any official document where this definition would applied outside the scope of the document itself.

Even though I didn't find an official definitive answer, I find at least one law that defines a week as starting on Sunday in its French version:

"« semaine » Période de sept jours consécutifs commençant le dimanche, de même que toute autre période prévue par règlement." -- http://www.servicecanada.gc.ca/fra/ae/legislation/ae_lois_item_2.shtml

Does anybody knows an official document that can answer this question?

[Patrick Gendron (spasas)]

I would like to reinforce the fact that even though we are using the French Canadian culture the first day of week is Sunday. It is the same with the keyboard for instance, event though we are speaking French we use the QWERTY keyboard and not the AZERTY one. Unfortunately, I do not know any official documents but I doubt the oqlf has any jurisdiction in that exact matter since it is a provincial agency. They cannot enforce anything for the country.

Canada has two official languages, French and English, is it really logical to have en-CA with Sunday and fr-CA with Monday ? In my opinion the first day of week should not be related to the language but with the culture. The language and the culture is the same thing for some people but they are two different concepts.

Moreover, before finding this bug I search launchpad to see if other people have reported this problem in their culture and I found some. Maybe Ubuntu should let the users override this setting in case of uncertainty.

Merci