Too many language variants

[kolya]

Binary package hint: dictionaries-common

In almost every application which can check spelling (FF, Pidgin, gedit) I get several variants of English language - US, UK, AU, CA - 5 in total.
It seems logical to me that 99% of Ubuntu installations have English language (and dictionaries) installed, and 99% of users never use more then 1 English variant (and many people do not really know what the difference is). So there are 5 options in spell check menu which just confuse users and are never used. This seems to be not user friendly at all.
Currently it even seems impossible to manually remove packages with language variants one doesn't use since language-support-en and language-support-writing-en depend on them.

It would be expected that user could select language variants he wants to use and then only these variants get displayed all over the system.
I'll really appreciate if this could be solved and Ubuntu UI could be made more friendly to people.
I'll be happy to provide any additional information.
Thanks!

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
Package: myspell-en-gb 1:3.3.0-2ubuntu2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.38-8.42-generic-pae 2.6.38.2
Uname: Linux 2.6.38-8-generic-pae i686
Architecture: i386
Date: Sun Jun 12 19:41:01 2011
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release i386 (20100429)
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=ru_RU:en
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=ru_RU.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: openoffice.org-dictionaries
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to natty on 2011-04-30 (43 days ago)

[era (era)]

I'm tempted to mark this as Confirmed, not because this particularly bugs me, but because the reasoning makes sense, and the bug exposes a fundamental design problem in dictionaries-common: what is installed is installed system-wide, with no optoin for the user to override what is being displayed.

Perhaps one could argue that this should be pushed down to individual applications which use dictionaries-common, but most Ubuntu installations are single-user (hard to say what sort of statistics to assume for the Debian upstream) and should give the user control over this type of thing.

[kolya (mar-kolya)]

Hi, even for 'non-single-user' installation, for desktops I think it reasonable to assume that all users speak more or less same language and it would be very rare if this includes several different English variants. :)

Actually, if I could make a suggestion here it seems to me that now all dictionaries installed somewhere in /usr/share/(myspell|humspell) and there is a lot of simlinking involved. So, it might make sense to allow users to make something like ~/.myspell, ~/.mhunspell which links to dictionaries. With help of command line, maybe some scripts or simple UI around this one could select set of languages he uses. And the only change needed for this - to make spell checking libraries look for dictionaries in somewhere home dir, and if that dir doesn't exist - in system location.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.