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paulm

Member

Registered: 2020-01-02

Posts: 4

MATE seems to override locale setting?

I have overridden LC_TIME in /etc/locale.conf in order to get a different date format. The necessary locales are enabled in /etc/locale.gen and I generated them with locale-gen, as root:

melis@juggle 14:25:~$ cat /etc/locale.gen | grep -v '#'
en_GB.UTF-8 UTF-8  
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8  
nl_NL.UTF-8 UTF-8  

melis@juggle 14:25:~$ locale -a
C
C.UTF-8
en_GB.utf8
en_US.utf8
nl_NL.utf8
POSIX

melis@juggle 14:25:~$ cat /etc/locale.conf 
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

Logged in as root I see the correct value for LC_TIME (en_GB.UTF8):

[root@juggle ~]# locale 
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC=en_US.UTF-8
LC_TIME=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8
LC_NAME=en_US.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=en_US.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=en_US.UTF-8
LC_ALL=

Logged in as my normal user account through SSH to localhost I see it as well:

melis@juggle 14:28:~$ ssh localhost
melis@localhost's password: 
Last login: Mon Dec 12 14:20:34 2022 from ::1
melis@juggle 14:28:~$ locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC=en_US.UTF-8
LC_TIME=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8
LC_NAME=en_US.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=en_US.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=en_US.UTF-8
LC_ALL=

But when working within MATE it seems the LC_TIME value gets overwritten somewhere:

# In mate-terminal
melis@juggle 14:28:~$ locale
LANG=en_US.utf8
LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC=en_US.UTF-8
LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8
LC_NAME=en_US.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=en_US.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=en_US.UTF-8
LC_ALL=

Strangely, localectl does show the correct value:

melis@juggle 14:31:~$ localectl
System Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8
               LC_TIME=en_GB.UTF-8
    VC Keymap: (unset)            
   X11 Layout: (unset) 

I cannot find any MATE setting that would influence the locale, nor do I see a relevant bug report, or something like that, in the MATE github repo. Does anyone have a clue what could be going on here? I don't have a ~/.config/locale.conf, nor use any special shell (plain bash).