Request: better override functionality in locale settings

[Sebastian Kügler]

Hi Matthew,

Thanks for your feedback regarding locale settings. Find some explanations for 
the changes below.

On Tuesday, August 26, 2014 13:04:10 Matthew Ruffalo wrote:
> I've been a long-time KDE user, and I must say that Plasma 5 looks
> *great*. Everything looks very polished and I'm looking forward to using
> it on a stable Linux distribution.
> 
> In all of my usage of KDE, I've always greatly appreciated how
> customizable the locale settings are. I live in the United States and
> have various options set for American English. However, I have
> configured my system to use the far superior formats for time (24-hour),
> date (YYYY-MM-DD) and measurements (metric over the imperial units). The
> Locale settings in KDE 4 allow me to override these settings very easily.

The locale handling has changed completely from the previous KDE version. 
Instead of brewing our own locale, we now rely on Qt, and use standard POSIX 
settings for these. That means that the granularity is reduced, which also 
reduces complexity. It also means that not all options are available anymore, 
some of them to be brought back as QLocale catches up. (We're improving it 
actively, but those things take time.)

> I've been testing out the live CDs available at
> http://files.kde.org/snapshots/ and I'm very concerned about the
> "Formats" module of the regional settings. The "Detailed Settings"
> overrides are essentially *unusable*, as shown in
> http://i.imgur.com/onT3zOr.png . (I took this screenshot from the ISO
> image named neon5-201408220837.iso.) When I try to override the time for
> a 24-hour format, I am forced to guess about a region of the world that
> uses this format instead of simply entering YYYY-MM-DD as before.

Locale rules are too complex to just express it in a few format strings, 
they're specific for regions and languages.

> Additionally, the list of locales is enormous, with very limited
> scrolling capability. I am forced to point my mouse cursor at the bottom
> arrow and wait as the list scrolls very slowly. The other detailed
> settings overrides behave in the same way. In particular, the
> "Measurement Units" option should probably simply show "metric/imperial".

There's more than just metric and imperial. This page gives you a slight 
impression of the complexity: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_units#Current_use_of_imperial_units

A binary combobox is just not enough to portray this correctly.

> In my opinion, this is a very serious usability regression and would
> stop me from using Plasma 5. Are there any plans to change the
> behavior/appearance of this settings applet?

I don't know what it is, but anytime someome doesn't like something, it's 
"usability" all of a sudden. Usability has a strict meaning, and translating 
it to "I don't use it, but I don't like it, so it's bad usability" isn't very 
useful.

I understand that it changes you way you set up your system, of course.

> I searched the bug tracker for anything related to this and only found
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=337563 -- I'm hoping that Martin
> Klapetek means to say that the *digitial clock itself* won't have 12/24
> hour options and that it should be set in the global locale settings.

We don't plan to add a 12/24 hour setting for the time, system-wide.

> I
> fully appreciate and agree with this; I'm asserting that the locale
> settings module is barely usable to override the time or date formats.

Well, I'm asserting that it's a huge step forward for the majority of users. 
For those, that are missing options, we will bring back some more functions as 
it becomes technically feasible, but I doubt we'll ever get back to the micro-
settings-jungle that Plasma 4 had.

Cheers,
-- 
sebas

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