UI uses chinese, french and english simultaneously

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement]

Not really a system-settings bugs, but I couldn't find a better place

I selected 'chinese', rebooted
then select 'french' rebooted

after the second reboot, 'search' on the top left is in chinese, categories scopes and u-s-s are in French and the rest in english (I don't know if english strings are displayed because there is a bug or strings are not translated)

On the screenshot you see 'Search' (in Chinese) and 'Vidéos' (in French)

TEST CASE:
1. Go to system-settings and change language to Chinese
2. Reboot
3. Go to system-settings and change language to French
4. Reboot

EXPECTED RESULT
UI is in French

ACTUAL RESULT
UI is in Chinese (search, HUD), French (name of the categories and system-settings) and English (the rest)

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 13.10
Package: ubuntu-system-settings 0.1+13.10.20131011-0ubuntu1
Uname: Linux 3.4.0-3-mako armv7l
ApportVersion: 2.12.5-0ubuntu2
Architecture: armhf
Date: Tue Oct 15 12:40:01 2013
InstallationDate: Installed on 2013-10-15 (0 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 13.10 - armhf (20131015)
MarkForUpload: True
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=linux
 PATH=(custom, no user)
SourcePackage: ubuntu-system-settings
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Iain Lane (laney)]

On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 12:47:54PM -0000, Jean-Baptiste Lallement wrote:
> Public bug reported:
>
> Not really a system-settings bugs, but I couldn't find a better place
>
> I selected 'chinese', rebooted
> then select 'french' rebooted
>
> after the second reboot, 'search' on the top left is in chinese,
> categories scopes and u-s-s are in French and the rest in english (I
> don't know if english strings are displayed because there is a bug or
> strings are not translated)
>
> On the screenshot you see 'Search' (in Chinese) and 'Vidéos' (in French)

From this broken state, please open a terminal and run 'locale', then
attach the output to this bug.

--
Iain Lane [ <email address hidden> ]
Debian Developer [ <email address hidden> ]
Ubuntu Developer [ <email address hidden> ]

[Iain Lane (laney)]

On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 03:03:57PM +0100, Iain Lane wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 12:47:54PM -0000, Jean-Baptiste Lallement wrote:
> > Public bug reported:
> >
> > Not really a system-settings bugs, but I couldn't find a better place
> >
> > I selected 'chinese', rebooted
> > then select 'french' rebooted
> >
> > after the second reboot, 'search' on the top left is in chinese,
> > categories scopes and u-s-s are in French and the rest in english (I
> > don't know if english strings are displayed because there is a bug or
> > strings are not translated)
> >
> > On the screenshot you see 'Search' (in Chinese) and 'Vidéos' (in French)
>
> From this broken state, please open a terminal and run 'locale', then
> attach the output to this bug.

And 'env' please.

--
Iain Lane [ <email address hidden> ]
Debian Developer [ <email address hidden> ]
Ubuntu Developer [ <email address hidden> ]

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

output of locale:
LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=fr_FR:zh_CN:en
LC_CTYPE="fr_FR.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC=en_US.UTF-8
LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE="fr_FR.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES="fr_FR.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8
LC_NAME=en_US.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=en_US.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=en_US.UTF-8
LC_ALL=

[Iain Lane (laney)]

Yeah, so the bug is probably that the languages are prepended rather than replacing the top element.

Will, could you take a look?

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Ian Lane wrote:
> Yeah, so the bug is probably that the languages are prepended rather
> than replacing the top element.

That's not a bug. It has been the way LANGUAGE has been handled in Ubuntu for several years. The LANGUAGE environment variable is a priority list, and language-selector has an interface to maintain it.

There are probably other explanations to the behavior described by Jean-Baptiste Lallement. Please don't mess with the the way accountsservice deals with LANGUAGE without further investigation. Even if language-selector-gnome will be replaced in Ubuntu, it will still be used by Xubuntu and Lubuntu.

[Iain Lane (laney)]

On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 07:12:07PM -0000, Gunnar Hjalmarsson wrote:
> Ian Lane wrote:
> > Yeah, so the bug is probably that the languages are prepended rather
> > than replacing the top element.
>
> That's not a bug. It has been the way LANGUAGE has been handled in
> Ubuntu for several years. The LANGUAGE environment variable is a
> priority list, and language-selector has an interface to maintain it.
>
> There are probably other explanations to the behavior described by Jean-
> Baptiste Lallement. Please don't mess with the the way accountsservice
> deals with LANGUAGE without further investigation. Even if language-
> selector-gnome will be replaced in Ubuntu, it will still be used by
> Xubuntu and Lubuntu.

I'm not suggesting that. In u-s-s we don't have an interface to maintain
a priority list, only to select one language.

--
Iain Lane [ <email address hidden> ]
Debian Developer [ <email address hidden> ]
Ubuntu Developer [ <email address hidden> ]

[William Hua (attente)]

We have to call the language-tools directly if we want this to work properly in u-s-s.

[William Hua (attente)]

Actually, ignore my last comment. With the language-tools that accountsservice is using, there's no way to fix this bug. We'd have to modify the .pam_environment directly.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

When language-selector is dropped in Ubuntu, I think it would be appropriate to modify language-tools in accountsservice so that it in Ubuntu only sets one language in LANGUAGE while it in Xubuntu and Lubuntu keeps maintaining the LANGUAGE priority list.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

@Jean-Baptiste: When you changed language, did you do so from User Accounts?

Please note that in 13.10 you can modify LANGUAGE to your liking from Language Support. For instance, if you no longer want Chinese to play any roll, not even as a fallback language, just drag it to somewhere below the "English" option.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

On 2013-10-24 21:45, Iain Lane wrote:
> In u-s-s we don't have an interface to maintain a priority list, only
> to select one language.

Right, I'm slowly realizing that. ;-)

Talked briefly with Will on IRC, and he let me know that accountsservice is used as is in Ubuntu Touch for setting language and formats. So from an Ubuntu Touch POV I agree it is a bug.

There are a few advantages with maintaining ~/.pam_environment from one place. I suppose it would be easy to modify accountsservice so it checks whether it runs on Ubuntu Touch, and if so only sets one language in LANGUAGE instead of trying to maintain a priority list.

Then when language-selector-gnome has been replaced in Unity with the region capplet in g-c-c, accountsservice would behave one way in Unity, UbuntuGNOME and Ubuntu Touch, and one way in Xubuntu and Lubuntu.

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

On 10/24/2013 11:44 PM, Gunnar Hjalmarsson wrote:
> @Jean-Baptiste: When you changed language, did you do so from User
> Accounts?
It is on a phone. I did it from system-settings/Language & Text.

>
> Please note that in 13.10 you can modify LANGUAGE to your liking from
> Language Support. For instance, if you no longer want Chinese to play
> any roll, not even as a fallback language, just drag it to somewhere
> below the "English" option.
You cannot do that on the phone.
>

--
Jean-Baptiste
irc: jibel

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

In a discussion on IRC the other day, it was considered better to create a new accountsservice method to deal with this issue than to make SetLanguage behave differently depending on platform.

However, later on it struck me that this whole issue is due to the UI in language-selector, which - unlike all other UIs for setting the user language - sets a LANGUAGE priority list. After having given this some more thought, I think that a new method would be to overdo it. Instead I have uploaded a change that checks for the existence of the language-selector-gnome package. If it's not there, LANGUAGE is assigned only a single language code.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package accountsservice - 0.6.34-0ubuntu7

---------------
accountsservice (0.6.34-0ubuntu7) trusty; urgency=low

  * debian/patches/0009-language-tools.patch:
    Don't try to maintain a LANGUAGE priority list if
    language-selector-gnome is not present (LP: #1240058).
 -- Gunnar Hjalmarsson <email address hidden> Sun, 03 Nov 2013 23:38:00 +0100

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

is that still an issue or did the accountsservice change resolve it?

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

Fixed in Utopic build #85