Thank you for your reply, Gunnar. Sorry it has taken me so long to
reply. I set up Lucid and Natty on a virtual machine and ran a few more
additional tests. Also, after reading through the Language Support help
document and the previous discussion at
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gdm/+bug/553162 I now have a
much better understanding of how language preferences are set on Ubuntu,
and how those settings have changed over time.
As I understand it, until a while ago, when selecting a certain language
at login through GDM, this would change all language-related variables
(i.e. $LANG and all $LC_* variables), which means that the display
language as well as regional formats were altered. The change you
(@Gunnar) have introduced only changes the display language and leaves
regional formats unchanged, so you can run an US English language-
session of Ubuntu which displays date, time and currency values in the
Swedish format, for example. You have achieved this by setting the
$LANGUAGE and $LC_MESSAGES variables to the selected language, but
leaving the other $LC_* variables unchanged, which thus retain the
setting from gnome-language-selector -> Text.
Hence, setting $LANGUAGE and $LC_MESSAGES on a per-programme basis allows a
user to run programmes in a different language, e.g.
env LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8 firefox
env LANGUAGE=en gedit
If I understand correctly, env LANG used to work on earlier Ubuntu versions
because $LANGUAGE still wasn't being used then. Under those circumstances,
altering $LANG would change a programme's language. To achieve the same
behaviour on Natty, $LANGUAGE needs to be unset: unset LANGUAGE; env
LANG=en_US.UTF-8 gedit
While changes you have applied appear logical to me, I am wondering if
this is in line with how most applications handle language settings?
What I mean is, are you sure all programmes either use $LANGUAGE or
$LC_MESSAGES to determine their display language? Are there applications
which look at other variables, e.g. $LANG, to determine their display
language? Are such problems to be expected on the user's side?
Ironically, both commands you suggested above (env LANGUAGE and env
LC_MESSAGES) also work for me now. Not sure if I did anything wrong
before, but it seems this bug report is invalid. I'll track this issue
for a few more days and, if no illogical behaviour appears again, mark
the bug as invalid.
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/792735
Title:
Language selection at login overrides language selection via env LANG
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