David, While I'd love to see all people in the world using this sortable date format, GMT time and speaking spanish :P, I have to face reality in form of the users' locale.
David E Jones escribió: > > Adrian, > > Please step outside of yourself a little bit and realize that your > experiences are not the same as the whole world and that perhaps > you're not in a position to speak for the whole world. Also, which > systems or even types of systems have you used? > OFBiz is (or aspires to be!) a global friendly corporate scale ERP > system. In my view this makes the two things we've been discussing > contradictory: > > 1. properly support multiple time zones (important for global ERP > systems, doesn't matter for USA or Europe only desktop small business > apps) I also agree with you that lack of timezone support is a major problem which can break havoc in form of database consistency and scheduling problems. > > 2. use funny local customs for date format (bad for global ERP > systems, good for USA or Europe only desktop small business apps) > > Some places in the world don't have a consistent standard. In the USA > my experience has been there are multiple standards, though yes the > defacto one is month/day/year - even though ordering things that way > makes NO sense whatsoever. You can take Excell. While not a global-focused ERP, excell files are exchanged everyday through mail between different locales. Date formats are viewed according to the user locale (which can also be configured) and everybody is happy. Why can't ofbiz support this? > > Anyway, how long does it takes for a user to get the idea of a > descending date/time format? A few minutes maybe? How much a discussion like this will take with a manager? How many more complaints (translated to effort in meetings) will the system suffer from this issue? > How annoying is it to have different entry formats in different places > (it will be a fair bit of work to make them all consistently different > in OFBiz now...)? Even if they are all consistent, how annoying is it > to produce different documentation and screen shots for different > places around the world, even if nothing is different other than this? Well, the language will be different also (in non-english countries), so the screenshots will have to be changed anyway. > How confusing is it for "George" in a support call center in India to > take calls from all over the world and have to figure out what the > user is seeing on the other end and why they're getting a date format > error or worse some other obscure error or a non-error but unexpected > result when the user guesses wrong about the format? What about the > poor users (like me!) who travel and use web sites around the world > and always have to guess about the date format, sometimes getting it > wrong and would really just like to have thing It should not be a problem is George has a tool to select the correct user's locale (as ofbiz has). How many poor users (like me) have to suffer global ecommerce sites (like amazon) not respecting my locale (not only dates in mm/dd/yyyy format but also lack of support for accents, unicode, etc ...)? > > Of course, we should really give this some time and let others express > their opinions. I also realize I've only experienced a small corner of > the world, but that is the main reason I have for keeping this > consistent and as standard as possible for the ERP world. -- Daniel
