Trisquel 12 MATE: ayatana-datetime-indicator does not display the date on the panel as defined by locale settings
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After upgrading to Ecne, it appeared that the month and date displayed on the panel do not follow the order defined by the regional format (fr_FR). Month names and day names are properly translated, but the date should be displayed before the month. It currently says "%b %e" or "%a %b %e" instead of the expected "%d %b" or "%a %d %b" A fresh Ecne install on a VM behaves the same after checking day, date and month in the indicator settings.
The date command correctly returns "%a %d %b", and date format is fine everywhere else on the system, so this is yet another ayatana mystery. I am posting this here in case someone discovers a hidden gsettings key that could restore order around the clock. It has been reported to the ayatana team so they may also provide feedback and/or a fix.
UPDATE: the key is 'time-format', the path is 'org.ayatana.indicator.datetime' and the key value is 'custom'. Then 'custom-time-format' can either be set to '%c', which makes the date show in the expected format on the panel, consistent with the system locale and with the output of date, or to any other custom format using the date formatting conversion specifications as listed by:
man strftime
There is another small glitch, that affects both fr_FR and the default en locale: the date shown on the panel is formatted as %e instead of %d, which means that the leading zero is replaced by a space, as in "jan. 1" vs. "jan. 01". An easy thing to miss, but this suggests that the default date format is hardcoded in the datetime indicator instead of being based on the system locale.
NB: ayatana-datetime-indicator is yet another hallucination. The actual package name is ayatana-indicator-datetime.