Hmm, it seemed to me that i wrote this up some time ago in bugzilla, but now i 
can't find it anymore... whatever.

Handling of different regional settings in oo.org

right now oo.org hardcodes all settings to it's internal locale. This has caused 
some problems to users, so i'll try to summarize on what i think would be pretty 
good solution. (please don't set this as dup for some issue that covers only 
some part of reg settings, like decimal symbol)

oo.org should still have it's internal regional settings, but with following 
enchancements :

generally it still should ship it's own settings (that are kept uptodate).
user must be able to choose from 3 main options - his environments settings (if 
available), settings that ship with oo.org and custom.
oo.org should be able to autodetect most of the environments.

there should be a way to set regional settings from os/desktop environment (if 
available). This could be done either by button that sets all oo.org regional 
settings to the ones found in underlaying environment either by radiobutton - 
but in this case it must be possible to choose another option "custom" keeping 
previous values - if, for example, user wants to use his environments settings, 
but change one thing in them.

regional settings that should ship with oo.org, that should be available for 
user to customize and that should be possible to retrieve from environment (if 
available) :

decimal symbol;
digit grouping symbol;
digit grouping on/off;
negative number format (just like it is possible to set this in calc for every 
cell, maybe more preset options - oo.org should try to detect this setting, if 
available - set it to default for calc);
list separator;
measurement units;
currency;
time format;
date format.

this is just a brief & fast list, it should be scrupulously checked and probably 
some things should be global to oo.org, some local up to cell level, some 
settings probably should not be set this way and probably some are not 
mentioned.