GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 155950
Clock shows incorrect dates from and prior to Oct 1582
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
click clock in menubar click repeatedly on year arrow to select 1582 click month arrow to select October The calendar incorrectly shows consecutive days from 1 to 31 In the Gregorian calendar there is a date discontinuity in this month. To make the transition from the Julian to the Gregorian system, October 1582 only contains the days: 1 to 4 15 to 31 (excluding days 5 to 14) Thus Oct 1, 1582 starts on a Monday. Likewise, every month prior to Oct 1582 in the clock applet has all the dates falling on the incorrect day of the week.
Does this really matter ? What are the uses of dates prior to 1582 ?
Looks like bug #125267, except it's not the same date :-)
It matters to the extent of the design intentions of this calendar. In either case a change needs to be made: 1) If the calendar is not intended to support dates far in the past, then the correct solution would be to prevent the user from decrementing the year without limit (e.g. choose an arbitrary cut-off year like 1583, 1753, or maybe 1970). The Windows OS (ugh) has a cutoff of 1980 (this should influence you to choose the next option ;) . 2) If the calendar is supposed to support dates far into the past, then its display should be corrected to present the actual calendar and not an incorrect mathematical extrapolation. It would also be helpful if one could type in a year directly, as well as use the arrow buttons. Since different countries have adopted the Gregorian calendar at different times (starting with Italy, Spain, Portugal and Poland) one would want to try and make the calendar locale sensitive. The predominant use of calendars is to correlate a date with a day of week. Granted the likelihood of users looking up 4 centurly old dates is rare. When this does happen (for example when I wanted to cross check the Julian-Gregorian transition with another source) the current behavior is wrong. Calendars that I have written (based on java.util.Calendar), and those I have seen elsewhere, take all these matters into consideration. You need look no further than the BSD 'cal' utility. From the manpage: > The Gregorian Reformation is assumed to have occurred in 1752 on the 3rd > of September. By this time, most countries had recognized the reforma- > tion (although a few did not recognize it until the early 1900’s.) Ten > days following that date were eliminated by the reformation, so the cal- > endar for that month is a bit unusual. > >BSD June 6, 1993 BSD Wnen compared against the date/time control panels of other OSes, why should the clock applet be left broken?
Vincent Untz wrote: > Looks like bug #125267, except it's not the same date :-) Yep... it's the same bug, and it also appears in <a href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=113319">bug #113319</a> which was reported over a year and a half ago! I guess that I did not make my search broad enough; sorry for the duplication. The difference in the date of transition has to do with locale (when each country adpted the Gregorian reformation to the calendar).
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 125267 ***