Re: UI change of "Languge" selection in gdm2

[Chookij Vanatham <chookij mpkmail eng sun com>]

Hi George,

Just want to ping you that I'm still working on the
"sane on-the-fly greeter language switching " patch.
I'll be keeping myself to focus on it.

I'd like to ask for opinions about the following issue we were talking
last time.

> > Currently, gdm is able to provide list of various charsets
> > for one particular language by adding the message (Charset name)
> > after the langauge name (please see snapshots: gdm_various_charsets.rs.gz
> > for Chinese langauge as an example) but I have got the request that users
> > don't like long list of the same langauge in many choices.
> 
> It is up to the administrator to setup the language alias file with only
> those that make sense.  I think in the future we're really moving to all utf8
> and languages with more then one possibility of charset will become more and
> more of a rarity so IMO this is not as useful.
> 
> Not to mention that as a user I should be presented with a language, not the
> charset.  A regular user will have no clue what a charset is.  If you need to
> regularly use more then one charset something is very broken.
>
What I'm trying to figure it out is what we can do to help those users
who have their own old files whose names are not in UTF-8
(ex: gb18030, tis620.2533, ...etc)
and they want to move to Gnome environment as smoothly as possible
and, of course, let's say, we will have gdm2 picking up only UTF-8 locale
for all languages. Once users logging-in to their session which is
under UTF-8 locale and they start using Nautilus or gnome-terminal
to browse their old files whose names are not in UTF-8. Of course,
they won't see those file names correctly.

I was told about the idea of "on-the-fly users' session language switching".
This idea is similar to the "sane on-the-fly greeter language switching" patch
I'm supposed to have it done ASAP. Once users logging-in to their own sessions
which will be in UTF-8 locale in the first time and this idea is to provide
users the tool to have them restart gnome-panel and/or gnome-wm to be
restarted in the new language with the option of Non-UTF-8 locale.
Then, users can start any gnome applications (ex: Nautilus or
gnome-terminal,..etc) in the Non-UTF-8 locales so that they can see those
Non-UTF-8 filenames displayed correctly.

After I though about it a bit more, I got the feeling that,
restarting gnome-panel or gnome-wm might be a bit over engineering.
Perhaps, we just need to add option to gnome-panel to launch any applications
in different language/locale. Ex: At the "Launch" menu, the option
"Run Application..." pop-up window, "language/locale" option should be added.

Also, perhaps, gnome-session might need to keep track "langauge/locale" option
for applications when users's configuration file updated after users
logging-out.


It sounds like all those ideas actually may have nothing to do with gdm2
and I was also looking at how gdm2 starts users's sessions to make sure
that there is no change required/needed at all from gdm2. So far, I haven't
seen any need of coding change from gdm2 but I'm 100% garunteed.

I'd like to hear your opinion about it and how we should deal with those
filenames which are not in UTF-8 for this transition because, if we don't
provide this transition and gdm2 will allow only UTF-8 locales for users's
session, we would get a lot of noise from this issue and one of them is
that they want to have gdm2 to allow them to have their sessions in Non-UTF-8
locales.

I think, it would make the whole situation easier to provide the transition
and at that same time, we can be moving forward by reducing the uses of
non-UTF-8 locales and, particularly, the non-UTF-8 locales supports in gdm2.

Please let me know what you think.

Thanks,

Chookij V.



> 
> George
> 
> -- 
> George <jirka 5z com>
>    Then, when you have found the shrubbery, you must cut down the mightiest
>    tree in the forest... with... a herring!
>                        -- The Knights Who Say 'Ni'