Can't set language to Dutch (Belgium)

[Peter De Maeyer]

I want to set my language to "Dutch (Belgium)" but that just won't work. When I go through the motions of the settings menu (All Settings -> Region & Language -> Language), it lets me select the language, but in the end the language is never applied.
- I could set the locale to "Belgium"
- I could set the keyboard to "Belgian" (which is an
- But not the language.

I _can_ however set the language to "Dutch (Netherlands)", which is close but not good enough.

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

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[Tim Lunn (darkxst)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Please execute the following command, as it will automatically gather debugging information, in a terminal:

  apport-collect 1516358

When reporting bugs in the future please use apport by using 'ubuntu-bug' and the name of the package affected. You can learn more about this functionality at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReportingBugs.

[Tim Lunn (darkxst)]

The final panel in your screenshot, should trigger a popup to install language packs if they are missing, however you shouldnt reach this panel if the language packs are actually installed.

Can you also provide the output from
gnome-control-center --verbose (while reproducing the bug)

and

pkcon what-provides "locale(nl_BE)"

[Tim Lunn (darkxst)]

We get the list of installed languages using language-selector /usr/share/language-tools/language-options

However that is only returning "nl_NL" when the dutch language packs are installed.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

The described behaviour was introduced with the fix of bug #693337. (Nowadays the list in question is provided by the accountsservice package via the /usr/share/language-tools/language-options script, which Tim mentioned.)

Selecting language is equivalent to picking the translation of choice, so the list of languages in a GUI represents available translations. Since there is no separate Belgium translation into Dutch, it would make no sense to present more than one Dutch option in the language list. Consequently, Peter, nl_NL is good enough.

I'd consider this bug invalid.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

@Tim, I notice (in xenial) that the "more button" (I'm sure there is a more accurate name) is visible in the languages view again. Is that intentional? In any case it might cause confusion.

[Tim Lunn (darkxst)]

@gunnar, I hijacked that to install language packs, clicking on it gives you that "Install Languages" dialog you see as the last panel in the webcast. clicking a language in there, should trigger a packagekit popup that install the language packs, but if a language is already installed it should do nothing and just select the language.

Now what is causing the confusion is that I populate that dialog based on the contents of SUPPORTED and using the full locales rather than just the language code. So there are entries in that list, that don't correspond to possible output from language-options that populates the first dialog. perhaps I should be using just lang codes there, that might map up better with langpacks?

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Aha, forgot about the installation feature.

Yeah, basically I think that just lang codes would match the langpacks better. Chinese is an exception, though: There is a zh-hans and a zh-hant langpack (simplified respective traditional). But otherwise only the lang codes should do.

[Tim Lunn (darkxst)]

On Mon, Nov 16, 2015, at 01:37 PM, Gunnar Hjalmarsson wrote:
> Aha, forgot about the installation feature.
>
> Yeah, basically I think that just lang codes would match the langpacks
> better. Chinese is an exception, though: There is a zh-hans and a zh-
> hant langpack (simplified respective traditional). But otherwise only
> the lang codes should do.
>
> --
I think the reason I did it that way was so could also select language,
if use lang codes will have to boot user back to the previous dialog,
though that might work nicer anyway, I'll try take a another look at it
this cycle.

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--
  Tim Lunn
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[Tim Lunn (darkxst)]

Gunnar, I have filed bug 1516876 to track areas we can improve the language pack installation. I think I will just mark this bug as a duplicate of that one.