libreoffice / spreadsheet l10n / date format

For LibreOffice’s oocalc on latest Ubuntu (libreoffice-base 1:3.5.2-2ubuntu1 to take the locale settings into account for the date types, the LC_CTYPE needs to be set.

$ LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 oocalc

This causes a date input of 31-01-2012 to not get parsed as a date.

$ LC_CTYPE=nl_NL.UTF-8 oocalc

This causes the same input of 31-01-2012 to get properly understood as the DD-MM-YYYY format.

That does not make sense. LC_CTYPE should be used for character classification, collation and case conversion. LC_TIME contains the relevant information in d_fmt (%d-%m-%y). Why isn’t that used? Or — equally disturbing — how is it getting the right information from the wrong collation files?

And apparently I’m not the only one having libreoffice locale issues.