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Bug 589421 - f-spot date field is ambigious (and wrong for much of the world)
f-spot date field is ambigious (and wrong for much of the world)
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
Product: f-spot
Classification: Other
Component: General
0.5.x
Other All
: Normal minor
: ---
Assigned To: F-spot maintainers
F-spot maintainers
gnome[unmaintained]
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
 
Reported: 2009-07-22 19:23 UTC by Duncan Lithgow
Modified: 2018-07-01 08:50 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: ---



Description Duncan Lithgow 2009-07-22 19:23:18 UTC
* Ubuntu 9.04
* f-spot 0.5.0.3,
* European (da_dk) locale

The f-spot date field is ambigious (ie. it can have more than one meaning).

In the sidebar it is written as nn/nn/nnnn which could mean dd/mm/yyyy (as expected in Europe, S.E. Asia, Australasia, S. America, Russian Federation etc.) or it could mean mm/dd/yyyy (as users in USA expect and f-spot provides). This is a real problem for half the world.

Even in the 'Adjust Time' tool of f-spot there is ambiguity. The date is shown both in mm/dd/yyyy format and yyyy-mm-dd (the added calendar helps clarify). All these differences are just bad for the user experience, and in this case erode trust in the application and can mess up peoples EXIF data.

(A worldwide standard would solve this, but this is another story you can read about here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_date#Date_format )

Other information:
I suggest that the solution in all cases (not locale specific) is to switch to an easily readable form which cannot be misinterpreted. This means

* Each field must be unique

Therefore days, months and years must be represented differently such as 15 Dec 2003 or 15th Dec 03 or 15 Dec '03. I propose the big endian forms, starting with the year:

In this format the most significant data item is written before lesser data items i.e. year before month before day. This form is standard in Asian countries, Hungary and Sweden. It is consistent with the big endianness of the western decimal numbering system, which progresses from the highest to the lowest order magnitude. That is, using this format alphabet orderings and chronological orderings are identical. For example:

* 2003 Nov. 16

This helps people understand the ISO 8601 international standard 2003-11-16. It is also extended through the universal big-endian format clock time: 2003 Nov. 16, 18h 14m 12s, or 2003/11/16/18:14:12 or 2003-11-16T18:14:12.
(Some text adapted from wikipedia)
Comment 1 Peter Eijlander 2009-08-01 13:27:34 UTC
Hi Duncan,

I totally agree with you. 

This discussion is going on for ages already but it seems that there is no way to have the USA to see itself as a vast minority in this IT world and keeps on dictating.

Even Ubuntu has this misbehavour. I am looking all over the place to have something simple to say that I want to have ISO 8601 as standard format and nothing else, for also the Dutch format is wrong. Unfortunately my fellow countrymen do not think ISO and use dd-mm-yyyy and time is ambiguous too for we use to display time in 24 hour format and say it in twelve hour format even with omitting the am/pm notification. In my view, if we start teaching or children now to say "20 uur" instead of "8 uur" to indicate time as it really is, everybody uses it in a decade or so. The French did and they live with it. Finally we got used to metric although looking in the shops I doubt that very much seeing all displays being advertised in inches...

The priority should be set to "High" the bug to "Confirmed" and the severity to "Major"

Cheers,
Peter
Comment 2 André Klapper 2018-07-01 08:50:35 UTC
f-spot is not under active development anymore, has not seen code changes for five years, and saw its last tarball release in the year 2010.
Its codebase has been archived: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Archive/f-spot/commits/master

Closing this report as WONTFIX as part of Bugzilla Housekeeping to reflect reality. Please feel free to reopen this ticket (or rather transfer the project to GNOME Gitlab, as GNOME Bugzilla is deprecated) if anyone takes the responsibility for active development again.