sugar.activity class should call locale.setlocale()

[pierre]

When changing the locale to French/France, the date format is not correct.

On the XO, I get:

$ date
lun fév  4 23:38:11 EST 2008

I would expect a more Frenchy format like the one I get on my Debian server (notice that the day number "4" is between the day name "lundi" and the month name "février"):

$ date
lundi 4 février 2008, 23:33:09 (UTC-0500)

Also, that small python program show that dates are displayed the American way (Month/Day/Year: 02/04/08) instead of the French one (Day/Month/Year: 04/02/08):

#!/usr/bin/env python
from datetime import datetime
print datetime.now().strftime("%x")

In an activity, this date is displayed "04.02.2008" when one would expect "04/02/2008" (or "04/02/08" like run from the command line).

When changing the locale to French/Canada, problems are similar but we should get the same formats as French/France. From the command line, results are as bad. From an activity, the date is displayed like "2008-02-05", which is definitely not usual.

[AlbertCahalan]

2008-02-05 is an ISO standard, intended to be unambiguous everywhere. It also sorts well, at least until 10000-01-01.

Since the existance of localized dates is not immediately obvious (not all software is fully localized), the traditional numeric formats are all bad. (US, French, and Japanese) Only one day per year would be unambiguous that way. (08/08/08, 09/09/09, 10/10/10, 11/11/11, 12/12/12)

[pierre]

Albert, what's the reason for such comment? Are you arguing that we should all use esperanto (some would say US English...) and ISO formats to reduce the amount of problems on that planet? I hadn't seen the OLPC project under that vision...

[gregorio]

Milestone Never Assigned deleted

[pierre]

After a lot of googling, I've found at least the reasons for such a behavior with Python programs. The full explanation is here: http://docs.python.org/lib/module-locale.html A program will not be locale aware as long you don't import the locale module and call setlocale(), even if your environment is set with a locale!

So as the base class sugar.activity does not set the locale correctly according to the locale selected by the user in the control panel, you have to explicitly call setlocale() in your activity.

A test program: change your locale to a non en_US in the control panel.

#!/usr/bin/env python
import locale
import os
from datetime import datetime
import time
print "LANG=%s" % os.environ["LANG"]
print "TZ=%s" % os.environ["TZ"]
print datetime.now().strftime("datetime.now %A %x %c")
print time.strftime("time %A %x %c")
locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, "")
print datetime.now().strftime("datetime.now %A %x %c")
print time.strftime("time %A %x %c")

Displays:

$ ./test.py 
LANG=fr_CA.utf8
TZ=America/Montreal
datetime.now Thursday 09/18/08 Thu Sep 18 00:15:24 2008
time Thursday 09/18/08 Thu Sep 18 00:15:24 2008
datetime.now jeudi 2008-09-18 jeu 18 sep 2008 00:15:24 
time jeudi 2008-09-18 jeu 18 sep 2008 00:15:24 EDT

Why the sugar.activity class does not set the locale? It already sets the messages according to the locale; why do half of the job?

[marco]

The following works for me:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import gtk
from datetime import datetime
print datetime.now().strftime("%x")

Note the "import gtk" at the top. Activities imports gtk...

Have you seen any actual problem in activities which seems to be related to this?

[pierre]

Since build 653 when I developped the Clock activity (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Clock_activity), I've had problem displaying the name of the day or the date on my XO which is localized for fr_CA. In prevision of 8.2, I'm presently running a recent joyride, and I decided to solve that long lasting bug in this activity.

I dont have my XO with me at the present time, so I can't give you more details. I'll update this ticket tonight with more information. For the time being, I just checked into the Clock activity code and yes I import gtk.

Yesterday night when I updated the bug report, I created a test activity from the Activity Tutorial (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_tutorial), with a datetime.strftime("%x") instead of the Hello Word message, and it also exhibits the same problem, even if it imports gtk too. I'll upload the source tonight too, if you want it.

I've tested your code snippet from the python command line and it works, without a call to setlocale(). But from my tests, it seems not to work in a Sugar activity context...

[marco]

Test activity source would be great.

[marco]

Oh also, can you try to turn security off (remove /etc/olpc-security and reboot) and see if it makes the problem go away?

[pierre]

Test activity to demonstrate the problem

[pierre]

I've uploaded my test activity.

With /etc/olpc-security present, I've to explicitely call setlocale(). With /etc/olpc-security deleted, date localization works as expected.

[pierre]

This bug does not exist anymore in 8.2-762