Locale changes?

UNIX Solaris
1

I am upgrading a machine to Solaris 10 and noticed a change that would cause a problem for us. We have always used en_US.ISO8859-1 and selected that when setting up the new system.
This is the format on our old system

 
$ date
Fri Sep 21 10:35:51 PDT 2012

And this is what I got on our old system.

 
$ date
September 19, 2012 04:15:19 PM PDT

Upon looking this up, I was led here: Change of System Date format Post: 302395682
And like the OP of that thread, the C locale was acting how en_US.ISO8859-1 previously had, yet en_US.ISO8859-1 was performing differently. I wanted to know why, because the post I linked to mentions it shouldn't be different. Then I found that it actually is supposed to be different: http://dsc.sun.com/dev/gadc/faq/locale.html\#s10-2007-08

Great, it isn't a fluke. I realize it would be trivial to change strftime to revert back to the old way, but we like to stay as vanilla and default as possible.

Thanks for bearing with me. My question is: if we switch to the C locale, which is set up with the date format defaulting to the way we wish, are there any difference between the old way en_US.ISO8859-1 was used and C besides the date? I couldn't find a good comparison and I don't know what issues could be lurking.

Thanks

2

Implied Part 1 of your question: build a custom locale

Solaris supports localedef which lets you build custom locales. See manpage for locale(5)

Part 2 of your question

# locale(1) manpage
export LC_ALL=C
locale -ck LC_TIME >> C_locale

will show you all of the individual locale settings for your current locale for a category - the example uses LC_TIME. Set your locale to C, run through each category, writing to a file the whole way. Repeat the process with whatever other locale, writing to file the whole way.

You can then use diff to see what is going on.