Locales are not found if selected, and LANG states non-default (subcategory) name

[Jens Beyer]

On Linux:

$ locale
LANG=de_DE@euro
LC_CTYPE="de_DE@euro"
LC_NUMERIC="de_DE@euro"
LC_TIME="de_DE@euro"
LC_COLLATE=C
LC_MONETARY="de_DE@euro"
LC_MESSAGES="de_DE@euro"
LC_PAPER="de_DE@euro"
LC_NAME="de_DE@euro"
LC_ADDRESS="de_DE@euro"
LC_TELEPHONE="de_DE@euro"
LC_MEASUREMENT="de_DE@euro"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="de_DE@euro"
LC_ALL=

$ locale -a
C
POSIX
de_DE
de_DE.iso88591
de_DE.iso885915@euro
de_DE@euro
deutsch
en_US
en_US.iso88591
en_US.utf8
german

If I select "Deutsch" in widelands menu, it doesn't work. Setting language="de_DE@euro" or language="de_DE" in ¨/.widelands/config it works.

This happened a couple of times now for people on IRC.
I guess we need to try a few text domains for languages with different countries (e.g. for de we should try at least de, de_DE, de_CH and de_AT).

I don't know where that bug ultimately is caused, maybe someone can enlighten me here. I just know how to fix it for me, and everyone else who had the problem could fix it the same way.

[SirVer (sirver)]

I heard from this bug before, could someone take the time, hunt it down and finally kill it?

[Timowi (timo-wingender)]

I know where the problem is but not how to fix this easily.

We use gettext to translate widelands. The gettext library (we use it through glibc) is actually about localisation and not only translation. And this depends on the system. Not every system have every possible locale

On every system are sets of definitions, charmaps and everything which is needed to compile locale definition files. Now these locale definition files are compiled with localedef. The name of the locale definition can be choosen more or less freely. You can name a locale simply de or de_DE, de_DE.UTF8, de_DE.UTF-8, de_DE.utf-8, de_DE.iso8859-15, ... Some system have almost every locale defined by default and some systems enable only one or two needed locales during installation...

And exactly there is our problem. We do not know which locales (system, not widelands) are installed and we do not know how the installed locales are named. So if I for example want to test widelands in Esperanto but have no locale definition for it it is impossible to switch the language.

I see two possibilities to get this working:
1. Use the current way (localisation from libc) and find a way to map the installed locales to languages. It has the disadvantage that only languages are selectable for which a locale is installed.

2. Find a tool that does translation without needing the locale information. I do not know an alternative to gettext which is compatible to the current language catalogues. This way has the advantage that the translations work independent of the system setup.

[Jens Beyer (qcumber-some)]

I made it working on my current system setup:

$ locale
LANG=de_DE.UTF-8@euro
LC_CTYPE="de_DE.UTF-8@euro"
LC_NUMERIC="de_DE.UTF-8@euro"
LC_TIME="de_DE.UTF-8@euro"
LC_COLLATE=C
LC_MONETARY="de_DE.UTF-8@euro"
LC_MESSAGES="de_DE.UTF-8@euro"
LC_PAPER="de_DE.UTF-8@euro"
LC_NAME="de_DE.UTF-8@euro"
LC_ADDRESS="de_DE.UTF-8@euro"
LC_TELEPHONE="de_DE.UTF-8@euro"
LC_MEASUREMENT="de_DE.UTF-8@euro"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="de_DE.UTF-8@euro"
LC_ALL=

$ locale -a
C
POSIX
de_DE.utf8
de_DE.utf8@euro
en_US
en_US.iso88591
en_US.utf8

See the patch attached. It's basically just one line...

[SirVer (sirver)]

Released in build16-rc1