Re: Does YOUR language have an entry in GDM?

[Danilo Segan <danilo gnome org>]

Hi Christian,

Christian Rose <menthos@gnome.org> writes:
>
> I think the reasoning should be the opposite -- if it doesn't work yet
> unless you install these corrected locales manually, it shouldn't be
> listed in GDM either. 

That's a bit of flawed logic, with explanation to follow. ;)

> But we shouldn't from the gnome.org side put stuff as options in menus
> that we know won't work in the general case with many major stock
> distributions. Having stuff that doesn't work shown as sensitive options
> is just inherently bad UI design.

If GDM hardcodes available languages, then the list it shows would be
incorrect on many systems, and my guess is that it will be incorrect
for *most* systems.  So, your idea is to allow such a behaviour, and
disallow adding more locales to such a hardcoded list, so GDM would be
useful with other unlisted locales? [that's the flawed part]

Luckily, GDM doesn't behave this way, or many users would be
subjected to "inherently bad UI design".

This is what gdmlanguages.c says:
  /* Note: these should NOT include the encodings, this is just a translation
   * matrix for language_country names.  This is NOT a list of available
   * languages, just their names and where they are placed in the menu.
   * The available languages come from the supplied locale.alias */


> So I think the general procedure should be:
>
> 1) Make sure the locale works, and that it is contributed, accepted and
> included upstream in glibc.

Not really easy to do -- I've been sending my updates since summer
2003, but haven't yet received satisfying (positive ;) response.  And
if we take into account that there's no established date for next
release of glibc, there's no way to know when will those locales be
actually available to "general public" via "upstream" package.

Perhaps the way to go here is to go nag *all* distributions one by
one to include corrected locales (some distributions have already
started including updated locales, with notable example of PLD
Linux, perhaps even Mandrake -- Pablo?).

> and only then:
>
> 3) Include the language option in GDM.
>
> The order of 1) and 2) may be reversed, but 3) must IMHO always come at
> the end after the other two are done.

Meaning that once those locales get enough widespread, users will
have to wait another Gnome release cycle Gnome in order to actually
be able to use them through GDM?

So, instead of eg. 1 year required by GNU libc to spread, we need to
add another year for such recent GDM to spread?

I can hardly believe that this would even be considered as an option.
These are kinds of problems that cannot be fixed without starting
NOW, and not waiting longer and longer, and waiting for "other" side
to fix their problems first.

> That's just my opinion, but I'm strongly convinced that having stuff
> that doesn't work listed as options in menus isn't helpful.

Well, if that's the only issue you see with it, as a comment above
from GDM code implies, that won't really happen (otherwise, GDM would
be showing a lot of languages for which you don't even have locales
for -- am I repeating myself? I am? Good. :).

As it seems that your negative answer is based on flawed logic ;P and
wrong assumption, I think we can now agree that this is the thing to
do :)

Actually, maybe not for Gnome 2.6 for one particular reason: we're in
code freeze, and it seems there should be some changes in order to
allow codes of the form ll_CC@modifier, and act properly.

The big problem here is that I don't use GDM, so I never really
dedicated any time to it (though I heard a couple of complaints like
"how do I choose Serbian Latin here" or "why is date format incorrect
in Gnome", all related to this problem).  Guess it's time to finally
look into all of this.

Cheers,
Danilo