It would be really nice if GtkCalendar widget would have interface to set the start day of week manually, to whatever value user wants, overriding the value inherited from locale settings.

I'm just requesting a new accessor to the GtkCalendar API to set and get the priv->week_start value, in range of 0-6 of course: it would be up to the program using GtkCalendar to actually set it, normally we still would use the locale based start day.

If this is accepted, I would like the developers to consider a gconf key to set it globally to all applications using the calendar widget: this way, the change would be transparent and applied everywhere in user's environment. This key should be normally undefined, -1 or something else indicating 'use locale settings', so the current behavior does not change. This value would of course be initialized gtk_calendar_init() as usual, but I'd still like to see the accessors as well.

Note that I'm not suggesting the 'does week start on monday or sunday' code to be reimplemented, I want to make it possible to start week ANY weekday if user requests so: there actually exist official calendars which start on other days than sunday or monday!

I have two use cases for this change. Both are related to the Gnome panel clock's calendar view, but I just don't think this change belongs to the panel applet, it should be in the GtkCalendar itself.

- Many people like to use Gnome in English, but the default English locale has sunday as the starting day of week: you can find English locale which has monday as starting day (en_DK.utf8 for example), but this is not easy enough to do, and the start of week day could be just part of Gnome's time and date preferences

- Right now I live in Saudi Arabia, where week starts on saturday, weekend is on thursday and friday. Only way to set the local week to the calendar is to set LC_TIME=ar_SA.utf8, but this brings me month names in arabic as well and I don't speak arabic!

I could implement this change myself and suggest a patch, but I first ask someone else to consider it: maybe there already exists a way to do this, I just did not notice it in the APIs?