Request: better override functionality in locale settings

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Thursday 28 August 2014 12:21:21 Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> > Actually, while the fact that choosing formats and units by locale instead
> > of  directly isn't necessarily a usability problem, presenting all locales
> > in a single drop-down _is_ .
> 
> Surely, and almost every bugreport has some relation to usability, that
> doesn't mean that anything someone runs into is "bad usability", I'm against
> conflating issues and muddening our terminology.

Agreed: "Usability problem" is definitely not the same as "I don't like the 
way it works".
In this case, the best approach would have been to file a bug about the actual 
usability problem (i.e. the 200-item-dropdowns) which would have been acted 
upon, and maybe a wishlist item asking for the ability to directly set 
formats, which would probably have been closed as "won't fix" with the 
arguments presented in this thread.

> > See also the HIG for drop-down lists [1] which says "For a single
> > selection
> > out of a large number of items (n>20), use a list view". This is because,
> > as Matthew stated, scrolling through a huge list inside a drop-down is
> > very
> > very cumbersome.
> > I've just filed a bug about this issue [1].
> > 
> > [1] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=338599
> 
> We have 6 comboboxes which are all too big. This needs a serious design
> concept, we can't just replace them all with lists + filters, because people
> don't have 6000px height displays.
> 
> I've posted the same comment to the bugreport, let's move this discussion
> over there.

Yes, will reply over there.

> > The above being said, I do understand that people who e.g. prefer the
> > metric  system though they live in a region that uses the imperial system
> > by default might find it unnecessarily intricate to find out which region
> > uses their preferred system first.
> > The benefits of using the POSIX-compliant locale system instead of custom
> > formats selection still outweigh the costs from my point of view, but
> > maybe
> > we  can find a way for people to make it easier for them to switch to
> > common formats?
> > Could we maybe put a hint somewhere that e.g. en_DK might give people what
> > they need at least for the date and time formats?
> 
> There's the Examples section which shows exactly what one can expect,
> whenever the combo value changes. Not good enough? Otherwise, I'm out of
> ideas (for now).

The problem is that people still have to guess which locale might give them 
exactly the things they want before selecting one. 
I think the idea John presented about allowing users to edit their own custom 
locale file and then use that could be worth pursuing for the mid/long term, 
since that would then still be used by all applications, not just KDE ones.

Cheers,
Thomas