Firefox requires en_GB language package on en_US installations

[Ryan Finnie]

Binary package hint: firefox-3.5

This is a clean installation of 9.10 beta with American English selected during installation. locale is confirmed as "en_US.UTF-8", it seems to be using an American English dictionary in other applications (OOo, etc), Firefox is set to "en-us" in its Language settings, but seems to be using a British English dictionary. The test word I'm using is "color", though other seem to be affected as well.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Sun Oct 4 14:21:10 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
Package: firefox 3.5.3+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu3
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-11.38-generic-pae
SourcePackage: firefox-3.5
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-11-generic-pae i686
XsessionErrors:
 (gnome-settings-daemon:1790): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_propagate_error: assertion `src != NULL' failed
 (polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1:1897): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_once_init_leave: assertion `initialization_value != 0' failed
 (nautilus:1886): Eel-CRITICAL **: eel_preferences_get_boolean: assertion `preferences_is_initialized ()' failed
 (gnome-panel:1885): Gtk-WARNING **: gtk_widget_size_allocate(): attempt to allocate widget with width -4 and height 24
 (gnome-panel:1885): Gdk-WARNING **: /build/buildd/gtk+2.0-2.18.1/gdk/x11/gdkdrawable-x11.c:952 drawable is not a pixmap or window

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This particular bug has already been reported and is a duplicate of bug 333799, so it is being marked as such. Please look at the other bug report to see if there is any missing information that you can provide, or to see if there is a workaround for the bug. Additionally, any further discussion regarding the bug should occur in the other report. Please continue to report any other bugs you may find.

[Kyle Jones (mutiny32)]

This is not a duplicate of 333799, as that bug was filed for Firefox 3.0 and marked as 'Won't Fix' because of the maintainer's statement that Fireox 3.0 would be be receiving security updates only, although it had been marked to affect 3.5 as well. The upstream bug report on Mozilla's BugZilla has been closed, as this isn't a Mozilla issue, but an Ubuntu issue.

I can confirm that in 9.10 x64 and i386, this bug still exists in Firefox 3.5. Although the en-US locale is chosen upon install of Ubuntu, the en-GB language pack is unnecessarily installed for Firefox and Xulrunner on machines with en_US as the default locale. Even if the off-chance this is done intentionally as a small prank, the root for the language differences is political in nature to show a separation of dialect between non-colonial American and British English. Also, it adds unneeded bulk to Firefox and the OS itself.

It seems that the Ubuntu package mandates the en-GB locale to be included, while it should actually mandate the en_GB language pack be installed if the locale is set to en-GB. The reasoning is that Mozilla doesn't distribute an en-US xpi file, as it is the default locale of the browser and is built-in. It does, however distribute an en-GB xpi. I'm not a programmer, so the terms I used may be wrong, but the gist of it is there.

It seems that this may be a trivial issue, but it is still a bug and should be treated as such..

[Kyle Jones (mutiny32)]

I'm not exactly sure what package in the metapackage for Firefox is causing this. Maybe someone can point me in the right direction of a general place to look. All I see are configs that include the environmental variable %LOCALE% in chrome URIs. For some reason I keep getting the feeling that Ubufox is causing this somehow, so I'm going to associate that package with this bug.

[fiXedd (jeremy-logan)]

From what I can tell it looks like the language-support-writing-en package is depending on the myspell-en-gb package and not the myspell-en-us package.

[fiXedd (jeremy-logan)]

On closer inspection myspell-en-us isn't included because hunspell-en-us conflicts with it. It seems like hunspell-en-us is installing an American dictionary.

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

This is indeed the same issue as bug 333799. There is only one language pack for English at the moment and it is the British one. You are correct that it is an Ubuntu issue and we will look at addressing it in the Lucid cycle. Thank you and please report any other bugs you may find.