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Package: locales
Version: 2.41-12
Severity: normal
Tags: l10n
I am perhaps completely confused about this, but it seems to me the
time format in libc is incorrect, as far as "time in Canada" is
concerned:
anarcat@angela:~> LC_TIME=en_CA date
Fri 05 Dec 2025 11:30:46 AM EST
anarcat@angela:~> LC_TIME=en_US date
Fri Dec 5 11:30:49 AM EST 2025
anarcat@angela:~> LC_TIME=fr_FR date
ven. 05 d. 2025 11:30:56 EST
anarcat@angela:~> LC_TIME=en_OMGWTF date
Fri Dec 5 11:31:02 EST 2025
In the above, you can see the en_CA locale uses an AM/PM suffix like
en_US, while fr_FR (and a non-existent en_OMGWTF locale) do not have
that suffix, so correctly show 24h times.
I believe this is incorrect.
According to Wikipedia[1]
> The Government of Canada recommends using the 24-hour clock to avoid
> ambiguity, and many industries require it. [...] The 24-hour clock
> is widely used in contexts such as transportation, medicine,
> environmental services, and data transmission, "preferable for
> greater precision and maximum comprehension the world over". Its use
> is mandatory in parts of the government as an element of the Federal
> Identity Program, especially in contexts such as signage where
> speakers of both English and French read the same text.
That said, Wikipedia also says:
> Outside the influence of government style, the 24-hour system is
> rarely used. The government describes the 24-hour system as
> "desirable" but does not enforce its use, meaning that the 12-hour
> clock remains common for oral and informal usage in English-speaking
> contexts. It is not the recommended style in journalism, for
> example.
So that might seem to indicate that we should *not* fix this and keep
the AM/PM format, except Wikipedia *also* says that:
> This situation is similar to the use of the 24-hour clock in the
> United Kingdom.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_Canada
But then if you look at the en_GB locale, *that* uses 24h time
formats:
anarcat@angela:~> LC_TIME=en_UK date
Fri Dec 5 11:44:05 EST 2025
So, there's some inconsistency here. I think en_CA, being a british
colony and still somewhat part of the british empire (and,
technically, a dominion of the defunct Queen of Canada, Elizabeth II),
should follow en_GB on that extremely narrow example.
For context, I live in Montreal, Canada, and I prefer 24h times on my
systems. I am a native French speaker, but am fully fluent in English
and I've worked most of adult life in English. I've been working in
computer science for decades at this point and have been involve in
the earlier days of the GNU gettext project for french translations, I
think I'm fairly well attuned with the overall "i18n" / "l10n" effort,
even though I have somewhat given up on that utopia a while back.
In my day job, I communicate with people all over the world who use
24h time formats. In fact, 24h time formats make it *much* easier for
me to schedule meetings with other folks around the world, in
different timezones, as you can simply compute times with a single 24
modulo instead of two 12 modulus.
At home, I *will* certainly say things like "it's three o'clock" (with
"PM" being implicit), but I certainly prefer to *see* my clocks say
"15:00". I know it's bizarre, but I find it just completely nuts and
jarring to see *computers* try to talk like humans. There's context in
human language, and it's fine if people say "three o'clock" and not
"fifteen o'clock", that would be bonkers, we know what "three" means
in the context of the day.
But for time, in computers, using "3:00 PM" is just baroque and
weird. It feels like we're back under queen victoria and I should be
shoving coal in my computer to get it faster into the next millenium
so it can start speaking proper english already.
I originally investigated this as part of what I thought was a bug in
Nextcloud, a web application that supports calendar features, where
the date picker because weird at some point. At first, I thought the
issue was with Nextcloud, and discussed the problem in this issue:
https://github.com/nextcloud/calendar/issues/6359
... then I thought it was in Firefox, and found *that* issue:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1532923
But now, I can reproduce the problem all the way down to date(1),
which is part of coreutils so, technically, the bug could be filed
there, but I'd be surprised if the issue was *not* in locales (and
therefore glibc) at this point.
Thanks,
a.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 13.2
APT prefers stable-security
APT policy: (500, 'stable-security'), (500, 'stable-debug'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental'), (1, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Kernel: Linux 6.12.57+deb13-amd64 (SMP w/16 CPU threads; PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled
Versions of packages locales depends on:
ii debconf [debconf-2.0] 1.5.91
ii libc-bin 2.41-12
ii libc-l10n 2.41-12
locales recommends no packages.
locales suggests no packages.
-- debconf information:
* locales/default_environment_locale: en_CA.UTF-8
* locales/locales_to_be_generated: en_CA.UTF-8 UTF-8, en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
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On 2025-12-07 22:31:20, Antoine Beaupré wrote:
> TLDR: bremner: is AM/PM an anglo thing or does the Rest Of Canada also
> like computers to show sane (sorry, i mean 24h) time as the Rest Of The
> Planet? :)
So. I talked with more anglos, and so far the consensus is that I Am
Wrong, which is, unfortunately, a typical situation in franco-anglo
relationships.
I guess there's no bug here: anglos outside of Québec, to my great
distress and dismay, systematically and reliably use the AM/PM
system. Some expressed surprise at Wikipedia's claims that the Canadian
Government standardized in any way on 24h. Others claim that anglos
outside of Québec are barely *aware* of the 24h system, which I find
almost unbelievable...
So I'm closing this bug. One possibility to fundamental issue here would
be to make a en_QC locale that would reflect the fact that anglos in
Québec *do* adopt the 24h system after living here for a while. So there
*are* spaces in English Canada where the 24h system is in use, just not
coast to coast.
I think the best way forward might be to add a control knob in Firefox
to make it possible to tweak the 24h setting on its own, as a
locale-independent toggle. It's how the setting works on Android phones,
for example, and is a common solution to this problem.
But it's of course out of scope for this bug.
Sorry for the noise,
a.
--
VBscript: la simplicité du C, la puissance du BASIC
- Mathieu Petit-Clair
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