Thunderbird (+OOo) locale problem(s) in edgy

[Ian Rose]

Ian Rose wrote:
> Background:
> I have been struggling to get my edgy installs sorted with my GB 
> locale. Despite consistently choosing United Kingdom locale (en-gb) 
> settings, KDE set my locale to en-us. After setting my kde locale (for 
> each individual user) to en-gb settings, I found that Open Office 
> still didn't respect that, again setting itself to use US-style dates, 
> currency etc. That was straightforward to correct (although 
> time-consuming, having to manually alter each of 6 users OOo 
> preferences on 3 seperate pc's). (mind you, the fonts are 
> headache-inducing still!)
>
> Main issue:
> However I am stuck trying to get Thunderbird to use GB-style dates (ie 
> 1st April 2004 = 1/4/04 rather than the US version 4/1/04), despite 
> having thunderbird-locale-en-gb installed, and Thunderbird correctly 
> spell-checking using English/United Kingdom. Does anyone know how to 
> fix Thunderbird to get it to respect my locale settings with respect 
> to date display OR to manually hack them?
>
> Whinge: ;)
> Although I've used Kubuntu from Hoary onwards, I have never spent so 
> much time on launchpad before ;) !
Further info and manual fix:

It appears that the locale was hard-wired into the installer to use 
en_US.UTF-8 .
I tried "sudo apt-get install locales localeconf"
This set up a variety of locales ("  en_GB.UTF-8... done")
and I selected selected en_GB.UTF-8 - with NO effect
then:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure localeconf
again no effect, LANG was still set solidly to en_US.UTF-8

then:
sudo locale-gen en-GB.UTF-8
(this now showed the locale as up-to-date)

I then found a file /etc/default/locale and noticed that despite all the 
reconfiguring it was still set to en_US.UTF-8. Manually hacking this to 
en_GB.UTF-8 and a reboot sorted out my locale problems - LANG 
environment set properly, and Thunderbird using proper date formats. On 
a second PC all I needed to do was
sudo locale-gen en-GB.UTF-8 and then
kdesu kwrite /etc/default/locales << change locale manually

I'm a bit stumped working out how to report this in launchpad though, 
having no idea which package was responsible for setting up the locale 
incorrectly in the first place, and why the tools that are supposed to 
change it didn't work. This problem is new to edgy for me, like a fair 
number of other issues. I wonder if the six weeks taken out of Edgy to 
add polish to Dapper has affected the quality control?

-- 
Ian