gdm

  1. Bug #553162
  2. Comment #40

Comment 40 for bug 553162

Revision history for this message
Martin Pitt (pitti) wrote : Re: [Bug 553162] Re: Set $LANGUAGE if the user picks a different locale in gdm, so that language-selector and gdm stop disagreeing

Hello Gunnar,

Gunnar Hjalmarsson [2010-10-08 13:55 -0000]:
> > but gdm shouldn't offer me three different country options for
> Germany,
>
> Why not? Ok, it should offer you six different country options, because
> that's the available number. ;-)

I mainly mentioned this because for many languages there isn't
actually much difference. E. g. for German, Launchpad/Ubuntu langpacks
just ship "de", since the variations in the different countries are
negligible and just lead to bloat or inconsistent translations. The
major exceptions are Portugese, Chinese, and British English.

So if we turn this into a pure language selector, it could/should
become much smaller. However, I agree that this is only a secondary
issue.

> Or do you mean that users are currently led to believe that GDM changes
> _all_ locale settings? Personally I don't think they are, possibly with
> the exception of experienced Ubuntu users, who may remember how it used
> to work...

It's what gdm has been so far. TBH I don't know how many people would
expect that this also changes the time/date/currency/etc. format for
them, but I don't think this expectation is unreasonable, especially
not if you can pick a country in the list.

So, after this discussion I'm not opposed to turning gdm into a pure
language selector, and ask users to use language-selector (ugh, how
confusing :) ) to setup the full locale. But if we do that, I'd like
it to be done properly, i. e. upstream, and have gdm set $GDM_LANG
without requiring extra hacks like sed 's/^en\./en_US./' (remember
that this stuff runs on every boot and costs precious boot time).

Also, changing ~/.profile in Xsession.in is still an absolute no-go
for me. gdm writes its settings to ~/.dmrc, and that's where it should
live. grepping/testing/writing ~/.profile at each boot is just wrong.
I hope I'll be able to convince you about this point, then we'd have
consensus. :-)

Thanks, and have a nice evening,

Martin

--
Martin Pitt | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com) | Debian Developer (www.debian.org)