GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 347240
Date editor does not allow localized date formats (without :)
Last modified: 2015-06-15 14:28:55 UTC
Following item is valid Finnish timestamp translation: #. This is a strftime() format. %H = hour (0-23), %M = minute. #: ../widgets/misc/e-dateedit.c:1436 ../widgets/misc/e-dateedit.c:1763 msgid "%H:%M" msgstr "%H.%M" String is shown correctly in editor, but the user can't enter new dates because the editor component checks that the format matches the common nn:mm format. If the entry is manually modified from nn.mm to nn:mm the date is accepted. Using . as time delimiter is official Finnish standard, nobody really cares about it though and everyone uses : - it still should be possible to do the right thing as well.
*** Bug 347241 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I did a workaround for Finnish translation (using in 2.14 the 'invalid' format %H:%M until it's fixed), but the bug is most likely really old.
Bumping version to a stable release.
In 3.2.3 it is the other way round: You cannot enter 11:30 in Finnish, must enter 11.30 instead.
The related code resides in the evolution-data-server, libedataserver/e-time-utils.c, where is a list of formats marked for the translation, thus evolution-data-server lefts the responsibility to use the right format to the translators. These strings are not otherwise modified. It probably doesn't surprise that one cannot use a dot when trying to enter the time in an en_US.utf8 locale. The same it might not surprise if the translator used a different separator (like the dot in the Finish) and the colon cannot be used. I guess there are more than these two separators being used in different locales, aren't there? So we have a time separator and a date separator. The routines use one, the other, or both (when parsing date and time at once). Should there be a list of possible date/time separators, and mix them all together, just in case a Finish person would like to enter a Finish-formatted time when running evolution in the English locale? (No offence meant, 'Finish' used as one of the known locales with a different time separator.) Any such change might make the code quite complex, from my point of view, thus I'm WontFix-ing this.