224109 - Auto-detection of search date format confused by non-numeric months

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, defect)

Description

[drb24]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
Build Identifier: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.3 (20031013)

The default mailnews.search_date_format (0) is handled as if 
mailnews.search_date_format=6 (dd-yyyy-mm) had been specified when the system 
short date format is "31-Dec-1999".  Looking at 
http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/mailnews/base/resources/content/dateFor
mat.js it appears this is a general problem with short date formats using non-
numeric months.  See lines 84, 89 and 94 in particular.

I have tested only with Thunderbird but suspect this is a general MailNews bug.

My apologies if the above lxr URI points to code not used in Thunderbird; I am 
unsure how to search online through the Thunderbird source.  Of course, the 
code aligns well with the behaviour I am seeing...


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Set system short date format to 31-Dec-1999.
1a. On Windows XP, this requires changes in the "Regional and Language 
Options" control panel.  I customize the default locale using the "Customize" 
button and that dialogue's Date tab and short date format drop down.  Some 
locales probably default to (short) month names in the short date format.
2. If not already done, install Thunderbird 0.3 and configure as appropriate
3. Start up Thunderbird
4. Right click a mail folder to bring up context menu for that folder
5. Choose "Search Messages"
6. Change criteria (initially reading "Subject") drop down to read "Date"

Actual Results:  
Final column displays 29-2003-10 (today), indicating the format chosen by 
getLocaleShortDateFormat() is 6.  Input of a search using this criteria 
demonstrates this is the case.

Expected Results:  
Display 29-10-2003, the numeric format corresponding to the system short date 
format.  Use this as the input format for a Date search criteria.

Work around: Adding user_pref("mailnews.search_date_format",5); to the user.js 
file fixes my particular problem.

This is, in some respects, a bug against the fix for bug 98144.

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

This is indeed a MailNews bug.  I've seen it in Win98 and Win2K; I have no idea 
if this applies to other platforms.

As noted in bug 228868, this bug appears in all date-edit fields: Search, 
Filter, Mark As Read By Date.

Comment 2

[Robert Kaiser]

MASS-CHANGE:
This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state.

If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way.
If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar).
If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state.

Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614

Comment 3

[Robert Kaiser]

MASS-CHANGE:
This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but still has no comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project 5 years ago.

Because of this, we're resolving the bug as EXPIRED.

If you still can reproduce the bug on SeaMonkey 2 or otherwise think it's still valid, please REOPEN it and if it is a platform or toolkit issue, move it to the according component.

Query tag for this change: EXPIRED-20100420