Incorrect locale interpretation regression

[Olli Niemi]

I live in a country having one spoken language: Finnish. Many people in this country speak/understand other than Finnish. Most understand Swedish and/or English. The defaults have been changed for locale in 13.04, causing regression. Calendar is now in Finnish only but nothing suggest Finnish-only output in locales (upper right corner in UI settings). It seems also the "ls" command is broken, showing Finnish output for non-Finnish speakers. Just a guess this doesn't affect only Finland...

This problem affects multiple software in Ubuntu and the Ubuntu configuration change has caused it. So multiple separate error reports are needed for this regression for each of the impacted packages.

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[Fabio Marconi (fabiomarconi)]

Hallo
Can this be a duplicate of bug 1072019 ?
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[Olli Niemi (olliniem)]

Don't know about bug 1072019 but sounds similar. There has been a locale change in 13.04. From my locales (untouched):

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC=fi_FI.UTF-8
LC_TIME=fi_FI.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY=fi_FI.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER=fi_FI.UTF-8
LC_NAME=fi_FI.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=fi_FI.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=fi_FI.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=fi_FI.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=fi_FI.UTF-8
LC_ALL=

Now the locale in 13.04 looks correct to me. Before it was incorrect (in 12.10). I don't know how many packages there are having this problem but it's probable now that full translation (if language is available) is done in several applications.

Just checked the Regional options: "Display numbers, dates and currency amounts in the usual format for:". It is clearly a bug if country specific setting here simply overwrites the language setting.

[Olli Niemi (olliniem)]

If we check the calendar (top right hand corner) in 13.04 with Finnish settings we see it says "la touko" (for Saturday and May). This is incorrect as both "la" and "touko" can be have the same meaning in English (abbreviated Sat and May). When we check the calendar itself we see that the week now starts from Monday, which is correct. Then we see translated dates for the week ("ma ti ke to pe la su"), which is incorrect. Then we again see "lauantai, 4 toukokuu 2013" in the heading, which is incorrect. The correct would be as it is in regional settings, "la 4. toukokuuta 2013".

In Finland "4." actually means "4th", causing that you have use that "ta" ending for the month. There are regional ways to say full dates meaning you can't just pick numbers and say the same thing in different languages. I just see no reasoning why the calendar has to be in Finnish.

Same problem can be seen with the "ls -l" command which simply truncates textual moths from English to Finnish but still leaving time format to incorrect "20:40", which is "20.40" in Finland. Either select US-only output or try to be consistent with outputs. But in any case the language should be correct if set in locales.

[Olli Niemi (olliniem)]

Also "ps" command seems to be broken. It happily "localizes" just the month but follows no rule, i.e. time format in "00:00:00", "touko02". Probably all coreutils programs are broken in the same way.

[John Kizer (johnandmegh)]

Hi - does this bug still exist on a currently supported version of Ubuntu?

Thanks!

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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