Re: use of locale in "ls" again (Re: Japanese expression of date)

[Paul Eggert]

> Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2001 14:01:32 +0900
> From: Tomohiro KUBOTA <address@hidden>

> Markus' opinion doesn't explain why locale-independent 'ls' is
> better than locale-sensible 'ls', while it insists
> locale-independent 'ls' is not so bad.

Please let me try to explain that point.

Ideally 'ls' would present output in a pleasant format to everybody.
But this has maintenance costs, and documentation costs, and setup
confusion costs, and these are all undesirable.  It is not entirely
implausible to argue that a standard date format lowers the overall
cost of using and maintaining the software -- so in that sense, it is
"better" than using idiosyncratic formats.

Within Japan there are many plausible time stamp formats to choose
from.  They include the conservative format used by the likes of the
Imperial Household Agency, the ISO format used by the likes of
Slashdot Japan, the intermediate format that you prefer, and some
other variations as well.  So the question of a default is not simply
a matter of Japan versus the rest of the world -- we can't please even
just Japan with a single default.

And Japan is not unusual in this respect.  Most countries have
multiple date and time formats.  We can spend time trying to specify
defaults to cater to all these environments.  Or we can spend our (and
our users') limited resources elsewhere.


> If GNU Emacs recommends GNU 'ls' and the GNU 'ls' outputs locale-
> independent timestamp, what is the advantage to that GNU Emacs
> recommends GNU 'ls', the GNU 'ls' outputs locale-sensible 
> timestamp, and GNU Emacs invokes 'ls' with LC_ALL=C ?

But GNU Emacs doesn't invoke 'ls' with LC_ALL=C.  It uses whatever
date format 'ls' uses, and displays that format to the user.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your question?