Hi Rodrigo,

As you asked me on #ubuntu-desktop, I built g-c-c without the Ubuntu specific patch 52_ubuntu_language_list_mods.patch, in order to check out if the whole patch or part of it could be dropped in Oneiric.

I chose to respond through this long (hopefully not lengthy) bug comment. With this I'd like to say that we ought to talk more to each other on the locale/language topic; more about that in the end of this comment.

This is how the patch was motivated in the changelog:

  * debian/patches/52_ubuntu_language_list_mods.patch:
    - Change the list of options, when setting language from User
      Accounts, to items representing available translations, and with
      that make it similar to the language list in language-selector.
    - Make items representing language @variants be displayed as such.

To me it looks like nothing significant has been changed upstream that makes the patch less motivated than when it was uploaded.

With the build ex patch 52 installed, the language chooser UI consists of two lists. For me, the first of them does not show all installed translations, but it includes languages that I have not installed. It also shows two "English" items without disclosing which country specific translations they represent.

When I click "Other..." I see a list of all UTF-8 locales on my box, most of which are irrelevant considering that the number of translations are just a fraction of the number of locales. Also, in the case of @variants no info is displayed that lets you know which of the items are @variants. These are issues that g-c-c seems to have inherited from gdm, but which were resolved in the Natty gdm package as regards Ubuntu.

With patch 52 included, there is one list only, and its items represent the translations available on my computer, no more and no less. Each item has a label that unambigously distinguishes it from the other items, and you see if it represents a @variant.

So, I really can't see what good it would do to drop the patch in Oneiric and expose the users to all those bugs.

In both language-selector and the Ubuntu variant of the User Accounts UI the actual values that are dealt with in the language lists are language values such as 'es_ES' or 'de', while upstream g-c-c deals with locale names.

Our discussion started with https://code.launchpad.net/~gunnarhj/gnome-control-center/non-utf8-confusion/+merge/78140, where I propose that the call in gdm-languages.c for the language_name_get_codeset_details() function is commented. That change would hopefully make Colin, with his latin1 locale installed, happy, at least. :)

If you like you can blame the issue with installed non-utf8 locales on patch 52, since language_name_get_codeset_details() does not change anything if you pass a valid locale name to it. But that way of looking at it isn't fair, since the code that messes with codesets shouldn't be there in the first place, considering that we only deal with UTF-8 locales via the UI. In any case, dropping patch 52 the day before the Oneiric release candidate, as a replacement for disabling that irrelevant codeset code, can't reasonably be justified.

To make the intentions in https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2011-October/003219.html come true, without sacrificing useful functionality, I think we need to talk quite a lot during the P cycle. IMO it would be a good idea to start with the conceptual side of locale/language handling. Martin P. and Robert A. did just that this morning; see comment #12 in this bug report.

Since most of what I have contributed to Ubuntu so far is related to locale/language handling, I have some related thoughts in my head that I'll put down on a wiki page. Hopefully we can start talking soon. Looking forward to it.

/ Gunnar