Dear Maintainer,

I was playing around with the new Region panel in gnome-control-center
and it broke my language settings and the character encoding for
gnome-terminal.

Firstly, the panel shows the wrong options for language:

  British English
  Chinese (simplified)
  English
  Spanish
  Unspecified [ANSI_X3.4-1968]
  English

This is the output of locale -a:
---
C
C.UTF-8
POSIX
en_AU.utf8
fr_BE.utf8
nl_BE.utf8
---

So clearly Chinese, British English, or Spanish shouldn't be in the
list.

After setting English in the region panel, logging out, then logging
in, I have the following output from locale:

---
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
LANG=en_US.utf8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="en_US.utf8"
LC_NUMERIC=en_AU
LC_TIME=en_AU
LC_COLLATE="en_US.utf8"
LC_MONETARY=en_AU
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.utf8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.utf8"
LC_NAME="en_US.utf8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.utf8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.utf8"
LC_MEASUREMENT=en_AU
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.utf8"
LC_ALL=
---

I don't have the en_US.utf8 locale installed, so I'm not sure where
it's getting this setting from.

Also the gnome-terminal character encoding is being set to
"Current Locale (ANSI_X3.4-1968)" but actually I would prefer UTF-8.


What I would like is for the Region panel to allow me to select from
the available locales (i.e. C, en_AU.utf8, nl_BE.utf8, fr_BE.utf8),
not show Chinese as an option, and correctly set the locale
environment variables and terminal character encoding.


Cheers,

Rodney

Hi,

I can confirm the incorrect behavior of the Region panel.

For me, it will always list:

British English
Chinese (simplified)
English
Spanish

Also, while adding a new language from the installed locales by clicking
the plus sign works, the newly added language vanishes when closing the
regional panel (by clicking "All Settings" for example) and then, re-opening
it. However, when I set the newly added language as default, then log out
and log in again, it will remain in the list. Until I set a new default
language.

Furthermore, it is not possible to remove any languages or formats by
clicking the minus sign.

As for the broken encoding in gnome-terminal: This actually originates
from GDM_LANG not being set. I have observed this on some Wheezy machines
at work while my home machines do not have this particular problem. You
can "hotfix" the problem by manually setting your language in
/var/lib/AccountsServices/users/$user, however this should be fixed in
GNOME itself. See this somewhat related bug report [1].

Adrian

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=638353

2012/4/14 John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de>:

This particular issue seems to be the result of a commit by Rodrigo
Moya that makes the Region tab always show specific languages if a GDM
localisation for them is installed on the system:

https://mail.gnome.org/archives/commits-list/2011-October/msg04043.html

Here, as a work-around, I installed the Debian package "localepurge"
which at least only leaves as available those localisations that I
actually want to see.

Regardless, the above code itself would need to be fixed, because it
auto-adds specific languages without making it possible to remove them
from the list using the Minus button, which is what would be the
expected behavior.

Also, rather than attempt to auto-add a multitude of languages to the
Region tab, the language selector pull-down list should be restored in
GDM; whoever recently removed it from there really needs to get their
brain checked.

Martin-Éric

2012/4/14 John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de>:

This particular issue seems to be the result of a commit by Rodrigo
Moya that makes the Region tab always show specific languages if a GDM
localisation for them is installed on the system:

https://mail.gnome.org/archives/commits-list/2011-October/msg04043.html

Here, as a work-around, I installed the Debian package "localepurge"
which at least only leaves as available those localisations that I
actually want to see.

Regardless, the above code itself would need to be fixed, because it
auto-adds specific languages without making it possible to remove them
from the list using the Minus button, which is what would be the
expected behavior.

Also, rather than attempt to auto-add a multitude of languages to the
Region tab, the language selector pull-down list should be restored in
GDM; whoever recently removed it from there really needs to get their
brain checked.

Martin-Éric

Just a short heads up, there is a somewhat related bugreport to
the issue in the GNOME bugzilla, see:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=671530

Cheers,

Adrian

fixed -1 1:3.8.3-3
thanks

Hi Rodney, hi Martin-Eric!

Have you had a look at the new "Region & Language" control panel
in GNOME 3.8.4 which is available in unstable now. The GNOME
developers have completely overhauled the panel and looks much
cleaner now and actually works as expected.

GNOME upstream has also marked the bug that I linked as resolved [1],
so it's therefore safe to say the issue can be closed here as
well.

Cheers,

Adrian

I wouldn't consider this issue as fixed.

GNOME still shoves default languages onto the end-users, instead of
only showing languages for which libc locales were generated, or
whichever language was selected by the user via GDM upon logon.

2013/10/28 John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de>:

I'm sorry, but obviously you did not try the version of
gnome-control-center which I mentioned which does exactly that.

I just verified it again, by adding an additional locale with
dpkg-reconfigure locales. This additional locale was immediately
visible in the gnome-control-center, without even having to log
off and on again.

Just try it yourself.

Adrian

Actually, that version cannot be tested as-is, because too many of the
dependencies are not yet available in Testing and too many of the
newer packages that satisfy those dependencies Breaks older versions.

2013/10/29 John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de>:

That's completely irrelevant here since I tagged the version it has
been fixed in which is the version in unstable.

The key information for anyone looking into this bug is that it has
been remedied with the version of gnome-control-center in unstable
which will eventually propagate into testing and be released as
Jessie.

Adrian