Re: How to change mail/thunderbird date format?

[Christian Biere <christianbiere%gmx.de@localhost>]

Rhialto wrote:
> I just installed mail/thunderbird from the stable pkgsrc branch.
> It shows dates as 08/18/08 which I find quite annoying; I want either
> 2008-08-18 or 18-08-2008 (preferably the latter).

My personal babble:
2008-08-18 conforms to ISO 8601, an international standard. You might
want to get used to it. The latter SHOULD be illegal. I don't think
it is officially used in any country. Use of '-' implies ISO 8601.
18.08.2008 would be fine. It's used in Germany for example.
 
> Googling suggests that one should be able to set LC_TIME=en_GB or some
> other country, which thunderbird is supposed to obey. See for instance
> http://leuf.net/ww/wikidn?ThunderbirdAndDateFormat or
> http://kb.mozillazine.org/Date_display_format#Configuring_the_date.2Ftime_system_settings_on_your_computer
>  .
> 
> Unfortunately this does not seem to work.
> 
> I tried all kinds of variants including the character set as
> en_GB.ISO8859-1 or en_GB.ISO88591 or en_GB.iso-8859-1.
 
I assume you use NetBSD. If so, read the BUGS section of setlocale(3).
You're not going to like it. In a nutshell: NetBSD only supports
LC_CTYPE (the character encoding) of any locale setting.

> Does anyone have some other idea?

Look for strftime() and hardcode the format to "%Y-%m-%d".

-- 
Christian