Re: [Fwd: GDM Login - Cinnabar Linux]

[danilo gnome org (Danilo Åegan)]

Hi Brian,

Today at 20:22, Brian Cameron wrote:

>> Could you please let me know who is responsible for selecting list of
>> locales and its territories which appear in GDM login?
>
> I am the gdm maintainer, so I am probably the right person to work with.
> However, I'm not really clear how the locales in /usr/lib/locale relate
> to the gui/gdmlanguages.c file.  Most of the work in these files have been
> done by people in the gnome-i18n gnome org mail alias.  So I've cc:ed them
> for comment.

I think that a locale gets added and listed only when there's someone
who cares enough about it (so it's usually either a translator or a
developer working on Gnome in the particular locale who asks for it).
Locales which are not available on the system (GDM does these checks,
if I remember correctly), are not displayed on login.

However, adding all the possible combinations will have bad effects on
translation: GNU libc has at least 215 combinations, and that means
215 messages for translation in GDM.  Add to that any other specifics
of Solaris, *BSDs, ...

Though, if GDM switched over to iso-codes package, it would be a
very different situation ;)

> I'm not sure if these languages are supported in general by the different
> flavors of Linux/UNIX.  If they are, then we should probably add the missing
> languages to gdmlanguages.c and locale.alias so that they are supported.
> If these languages are supported just on Solaris, we might want to simply
> patch our distribution code to support the languages for our distribution.

On a GNU system:

$ (cd /usr/share/i18n/locales/ && ls es_*)
es_AR  es_CO  es_EC       es_GT  es_NI  es_PR  es_US
es_BO  es_CR  es_ES       es_HN  es_PA  es_PY  es_UY
es_CL  es_DO  es_ES euro  es_MX  es_PE  es_SV  es_VE

(Generated ones depend on users' settings, but GDM should probably go
for the superset, rather than subset, since it includes existence
checks if I remember correctly; but this introduces translation
problems as described above.)

Cheers,
Danilo