Date auto-mangle

users
#1

LO 6.4.6.2 (x64)

Revisiting a 3-year-old document (probably produced in LOW 5.4.x [that information is not in File Properties, where I thought to find it]), I find that Writer now insists on rendering dates in a table in "localized" (m/d/yyyy) format -- an action triggered as soon as the cursor lands on such date and then leaves that cell. Of course I don't want that crap (had I wanted that format, I would have written it that way) so looked for a way to turn off such "help". But I don't see it in either the Autocorrect|Options or in the Options settings. That prompts these questions:

(1) How does one turn off such "help"?

(2) Does anyone know when (with what version) such "help" began?
[Going through the archive <https://downloadarchive.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/old/>, I don't even /see/ release notes, even five levels down, short of actually downloading a package (and maybe not even then). Even if those release notes exist, 70+ releases just since 5.4.7 make looking through all those release notes a daunting prospect. I /have/ looked through the 7.0.4 and 7.1.0 release notes, and do not see a correction of this behavior.]

(3) An important bug, 46448 of 2012-02-22 <https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46448> addressed the problems with LO's misguided "localization" efforts, going back at least to OO in 2011. It has 59 comments, with simple solution summaries in comments 53 and 57 (no dissents). Noting that the number of LO duplicates of the bug exceeded 5 (currently 14 duplicates), Xisco Fauli (comment 23) changed priority to "high". Noting the large number of comments, and the consequences of some date/numeric failures, Christopher Lee (comment 59) suggested changing that priority from "high" to "fatal" (no dissenting comments). Yet throughout that process, LO has gone in the /other direction/, toward more extreme "localization" "help", with even more of the consequences described in the bug thread. Does anyone know how that happens?

John