Comment 10 for bug 306591

Andrew:

> Jonathan, do you have any idea what may be at fault here?
> I'm interested in filing this upstream but I'm not sure which Gnome package to target.

The more I look at this, the more I think there may well be no real bug here at all.

My change to the summary line was trying (apparently inadequately, since you undid it!) to suggest that the issue is not really "locale settings not respected by Gnome". Locale settings most definitely *are* respected by Gnome, when they are set in /etc/environment, or when set from the gdm login screen. I have multiple languages installed on this machine (English, French, German and Spanish), and I can log in using any one of them, and get appropriate menus, and clock date/time format, spell checking, etc. Locales *are* being respected. Unlike English, French, German and Spanish, I don't speak any Egyptian Arabic, so I've not tried logging in in that language :)

Rephrasing a bit: the issue being reported is (as I understand it, and now we are clear that refdoc's locale issue is clearly not a part of this specific issue): Gnome does not use locale settings which are set in the user's shell initialization file.

The question then becomes: Should Gnome in fact examine and use such settings, since Gnome does not itself necessarily use any per-session shell at all! Why would Gnome be expected to look in a user's shell initialization file? Is there documentation out there that says it should or will do so?

Especially since Ubuntu 8.10 has the "fast session switching" capability, allowing one to have multiple sessions open (logged in as different users) in different locales, I am not sure there is really much of a case for saying that Gnome *should* be parsing shell initialization files to look for locale settings -- is there? I'm open to hearing the argument that it should really do that, but trying to look at this from the user's viewpoint, I don't (yet?) see why it should.

The shell respects the locale settings set in the global environment and its initialization file(s); Gnome respects the locale settings in the global environment and it is own initialization files. (For example, have you considered setting locale-related variables in ~/.xsession, if you want to explore this kind of thing? Maybe in ~/.dmrc ??)

Logically, if you are using a GUI, then you set its locale at GUI session startup, just as you would set a shell's locale at shell startup. Each has a different way to specify its initial settings (though of course both respect the global environment).

Does this make sense?

Jonathan