162664 - Should support localised strings for date output (time2str vs. strftime vs. Template::Plugin::Date)

Status: NEW

(Bugzilla :: Bugzilla-General, defect)

Description

[Tobias Burnus]

At present words like Mon(day) or Aug(ust) are not translated based on the
language of the choosen template.
E.g. with the French template I would expect:
  mer aoû 14 14:38:44
but I get
  Wed Aug 14 14:38:44

I propose:
a) To use the POSIX function setlocale to set the locale (setlocale)
b) Construct the locale-language from the used RFC2616 Accept Language tag
(from that used for the template)
c) Replace time2str by strftime

The problem is that the RFC2616, 14.4 Accept Language header is not that simple
translateable into locales. They consist of a ISO 639 language code (ll) and a
ISO 3166 country code (CC) separated by an underscore: ll_CC

For the codes see:
  http://www.din.de/gremien/nas/nabd/iso3166ma/codlstp1/en_listp1.html
  http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/langcodes.html

For the discussion see Mailinglist (URL)

Patch to come.

Comment 1

[Bradley Baetz (:bbaetz)]

The posix stuff isn't portable to windows. If you do want to go that way, the
template toolkit date plugin does that.

OTOH, Date::Format (which we already require) does it a more portable way, but
presumably only supports a smaller subset of languages (Austrian, Czech, Dutch,
English, French, German, Italian, and Norwegian) If you did want another
language, you could always patch Date::Format...

Comment 2

[Tobias Burnus]

Hmm. If I understand correctly we have these possibilities:
a) Using Date::Format and Date::Language and support only
   Austrian, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian and Norwegian
   and get full support under Windows
   http://groups.google.de/groups?selm=3D46BBB7.2090406%40physik.fu-berlin.de

b) Use POSIX qw(strftime setlocale);
   which fails under Windows (URL) due to POSIX
   but supports about 70 languages.

c) Use Template::Plugin::Date which als requires POSIX and doesn't require
   the global.pl (or similar) to set the locale but makes the templates
   more crowded
   http://template-toolkit.org/docs/default/Modules/Template/Plugin/Date.html

For my personal usage either approach works since I use Unix and my languages
are supported.

Comment 3

[Bradley Baetz (:bbaetz)]

Template::Plugin::Date does require POSIX - it does:

    if ($locale) {
        # format the date in a specific locale, saving and subsequently
        # restoring the current locale.
        my $old_locale = &POSIX::setlocale(&POSIX::LC_ALL);
        &POSIX::setlocale(&POSIX::LC_ALL, $locale);
        $datestr = &POSIX::strftime($format, @date);
        &POSIX::setlocale(&POSIX::LC_ALL, $old_locale);
    }

I don't _know_ that this will fail on windows, but I'd be very surprised if it
didn't - it may work with some cygwin stuff, though. Can someone test?

Comment 4

[Tobias Burnus]

Change summary since to make it easier to find.

Comment 5

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

bbaetz: http://www.xav.com/perl/lib/POSIX.html says the POSIX module supports
Windows. Do you have another source of information?

Gerv

Comment 6

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Unless someone provides a source which says we can't use POSIX stuff
(Template::Plugin::Date) on Windows, I intend to code up a solution which does that.

Gerv

Comment 7

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Jouni: comments please?

Comment 8

[Jouni Heikniemi]

Years ago Posix date formatting didn't work, but things may have changed. I'll
try this out soon. I need the same thing for bug 82878 anyway.

Comment 9

[Jouni Heikniemi]

I ran the Date format plugin example code on Win32 without problems. Ask if you
need more testing.

--

    [% USE date %]

    # use current time and default format
    [% date.format %]

    # specify time as seconds since epoch or 'h:m:s d-m-y' string
    [% date.format(960973980) %]
    [% date.format('4:20:36 21/12/2000') %]

    # specify format
    [% date.format(mytime, '%H:%M:%S') %]

    # specify locale
    [% date.format(date.now, '%a %d %b %y', 'en_GB') %]

    # named parameters 
    [% date.format(mytime, format = '%H:%M:%S') %]
    [% date.format(locale = 'en_GB') %]
    [% date.format(time   = date.now, 
		   format = '%H:%M:%S', 
                   locale = 'en_GB) %]
   
    # specify default format to plugin
    [% USE date(format = '%H:%M:%S', locale = 'de_DE') %]

    [% date.format %]

Comment 10

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Reassigning bugs that I'm not actively working on to the default component owner
in order to try to make some sanity out of my personal buglist.  This doesn't
mean the bug isn't being dealt with, just that I'm not the one doing it.  If you
are dealing with this bug, please assign it to yourself.