[Techtalk] what the heck is it with locale and ls -l

[Carla Schroder]

So...any Linux gurus out there who can explain why locale is such a moving 
target? Check this out:

[carla at fedora etc]$ ls -l --time-style locale
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 46 Jan 11 11:29 adjtime
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 1518 Aug 16 2011 aliases

carla at mint /etc $ ls -l --time-style locale
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 10 2012-02-17 17:16 adjtime
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2011-10-12 08:11 akonadi

Both report the same locale-- en_US.UTF-8. So why does Fedora use the 
irritating date formatting where dates in the current year omit the year? 
While Mint formats all dates exactly the same, in long-iso? ls is not aliased 
for date formatting on either system. I seem to recall Debian wobbling back 
and forth on this too, with some releases defaulting to full-iso, while other 
releases used the Fedora style.

Anyone who can explain this will be credited and praised lavishly in an 
upcoming article. Fame and groupies await!

best,
Carla
-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Carla Schroder
ace Linux nerd
author of Linux Cookbook,
Linux Networking Cookbook,
Book of Audacity
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~