Bug#1121994: en_CA locale incorrectly uses AM/PM time formats, should follow en_GB

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? :)

On 2025-12-07 12:40:45, Aurelien Jarno wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 2025-12-05 11:55, Antoine Beaupre wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Yes, that matches what is in the locale data [1]. Note however that the 
> fr_CA locale uses the 24h time format [2].

As one would expect, yes.

>> 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.
>
> For a country like Canada, is there any variation between the 
> French-speaking and English-speaking regions, independently of the 
> language used? I mean is there any variation between Montreal and 
> Vancouver for instance?

To be honest, I'm not 100% sure about this. I don't live in Vancouver,
and while I know folks on the west coast, I haven't *lived* there so I
can't tell that much. I feel close enough to Ontario to make that call,
I think, but again, It's Complicated: I'm a native french speaker, and
that can certainly bias my perspective here.

Nevertheless, what I explained below is, I believe, somewhat accurate:
people do expect machines to display time in the 24h system, and I find
it jarring, and I'm pretty confident other Canadians would concur.

But, also, I guess any Debian Developer From Canada could weigh in
here. I added bremner in CC, I has been known to have opinions. ;)

>> 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.
>
> Yes, as said above this matches the current locale data [1], so that's 
> why many software are showing the time in AM/PM format.
>
> While this can be fixed in a Debian specific, experience shows that 
> diverging between distribution is just causing more issues. For instance 
> some testsuite might test output for the en_CA locale against an 
> expected output, and having difference between distributions just means 
> that we need to fix that in Debian specific patch. Therefore I think 
> this needs to be brought upstream first.

I am now properly terrified of the consequences of this bug report. :p

> You already provided a good explanation about why this should be 
> changed, do you mind reporting that in the upstream BTS [3]?  
> Alternatively I can do the proxy, but doing so might be difficult in 
> case the discussion gets long. Once there is an agreement, I don't mind 
> submitting the corresponding patch for review on the mailing list.

Sure, I'll try to collect my thoughts (and perhaps consensus over a
couple more Canadians first, oh boy), and will get back to you.

> [1] https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob;f=localedata/locales/en_CA;h=ca8ac5813abe293bd4a4c730af96d3a512f52539;hb=HEAD#l119

Thanks for confirming this too, BTW, I was kind of going nuts there. I
*had* seen line 123 there but figured "this is wrong, surely I have a
bug locally and this is not it". :p

Also, seems en_CA has been AM/PM since the beginning of the git history
there:

https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob;f=localedata/locales/en_CA;hb=f5f52655ceb5152d79ca88db5293fa1136969303

haven't checked intermediates, that said.

> [2] https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob;f=localedata/locales/fr_CA;h=93cd0c4c8838b3361bdc8d1c503628c3526f7540;hb=HEAD#l115

Thanks again,

a.