Localized software should respect only localized user input to confirmation requests.

Bug #307798 reported by Alexey Balmashnov
28
This bug affects 4 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
apt (Ubuntu)
Confirmed
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

I was confronted with the following problem on the Russian Support Forum.

Upon installation of software with apt-get by default one gets the following confirmation request:
"Хотите продолжить [Д/н]?"
(C-locale: "Do you want to continue [Y/n]?")

In this situation one may confirm his choice in localized manner ("д/н") or using C-locale ("y/n"). Here comes "the funniest" part. In Russian keyboard layout key "н" (to give negative answer) corresponds to Latin "y". So, if one does not pay attention to what layout he is actually using at the moment, he may accidentally confirm actions instead of rejecting them by automatically hitting "y" + Enter (instead of "н" + Enter)

I do not know, whether
1) apt-get is the only program with such behavior
2) on which level this behavior needs to be fixed (is this problem of particular software implementation or is this problem of localization, for example)
therefore this bug-report.

The summary of this bug report indicates proposed solution: if program asks to confirm by entering certain symbols it should not take into account any other input provided by the user.

Revision history for this message
Michele Mangili (mangilimic) wrote :

Hello Alexey, thank you for reporting this issue and helping to make Ubuntu better!

I read your report carefully and understood you point:

"I do not know, whether
1) apt-get is the only program with such behavior
2) on which level this behavior needs to be fixed"

In spite I don't know the answers to those questions, I'm going to move this report to apt package, since this should be the best way to handle this report. In the meantime I'd suggest to report other programs in which this problem might happen, in order to improve this report and helping developers to fix this issue!

Thank you for taking the time for helping to make Ubuntu better!

Revision history for this message
Evgeny Kapun (abacabadabacaba) wrote :

It looks like do-release-upgrade has similar problem. Sometimes confirmation request isn't translated but only localized input is accepted. This is confusing.

Changed in apt:
status: New → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Chris Hofstaedtler (zeha) wrote :

Please post output of these commands:
  $ locale
  $ cat /etc/default/locale

Revision history for this message
Doug Whitfield (douglasawh) wrote :

locale:

LANG=en_US.utf8
LANGUAGE=pt_BR:sv_SE:de_DE:en
LC_CTYPE="en_US.utf8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.utf8"
LC_TIME="en_US.utf8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.utf8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.utf8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.utf8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.utf8"
LC_NAME="en_US.utf8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.utf8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.utf8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.utf8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.utf8"
LC_ALL=

cat /etc/default/locale
LANG="sv_SE.UTF-8"
LANGUAGE="pt_BR:sv_SE:de_DE:en"

As far as I can tell, the System - > Admin -> language support stuff is pretty broken.

I picked US when I logged in, but all of my menus are in Portuguese. It seems like if I pick English stuff should be in English.

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