Default papersize (/etc/papersize) should be set according to selected location

[Mikko Rantalainen]

Binary package hint: ubiquity

I selected Finland as the location during the installer and still I have "letter" in the /etc/papersize. It should say "a4" after installation.

Considering that "letter" is used by default only in the Northern America it would make sense to have "a4" by default in the /etc/papersize and change that to "letter" only if required. Most of the world is already using a4 paper size.

See also bug 393818.

I also find it interesting that /etc/papersize is not owned by any package but it's documented by libpaper1 package (it owns the manual page documenting the /etc/papersize file). I think it would make sense to include this file in the libpaper1 as a configuration file. The default contents of /etc/papersize should be "a4".

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Hmm. It's definitely supposed to be updated to match the locale. We'll have to look at this, thanks.

Don't mess with the file ownership :-) There are subtle semantic distinctions between "conffile" and "configuration file" at work here, and it does make sense for it to be the way it is. Unfortunately there is no way to register a configuration file as owned by a package without invoking special semantics that do not make sense in this specific case. This has been on the dpkg wishlist for a long time.

[ebrjvd (jos-van-dyck)]

The logic to select a particular papersize seems to depend on language, rather than location.

If I select English language and Belgium as location, /etc/papersize is set to "Letter".
When I select Dutch language, /etc/papersize is set to A4.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

That's because there is no en_BE locale, and the paper size is a locale element, so we don't know what to do in that case. (One can make a human judgement that of course it should be A4, but it's tricky to get right in general.)

[Andreas Modinos (blueturtl)]

A lot of us select the English language as our default setting due to incomplete or poor quality native translation (or personal preference). However selecting the correct location in conjunction with the English language will result in an a locale like en_BE or en_FI. The default fall back for all regional settings seems to be to use the regional settings of the United States. This involves other things besides paper size. In my case all regional settings be they measurement units in OpenOffice or weather info on the Gnome weather applet need to be changed manually to reflect the set location.

It is my opinion that this bug is a part of a bigger problem as a whole, and should probably be dealt with on a matching scale.

Question is -- can an unrecognised locale be parsed somehow so that applications would use setting based on merely the location and not necessarily the combination of language and location?

[Simon Quigley (tsimonq2)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. We are sorry that we do not always have the capacity to look at all reported bugs in a timely manner. There have been many changes in Ubuntu since that time you reported the bug and your problem may have been fixed with some of the updates. It would help us a lot if you could test it on a currently supported Ubuntu version. When you test it and it is still an issue, kindly upload the updated logs by running only once:
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[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for ubiquity (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]