Comment 13 for bug 306591

I am not a GNOME i18n expert, at all. But I do know that if you use GNOME the way it was intended, i18n generally "just works" and you do not need to mess with manually setting locale variables in .bashrc or .dmrc or anywhere else.

Set a language at the gdm screen, and when prompted, tell it to make this new language/locale the default for your user, and it adds information to that effect to your ~/.dmrc Then, next time that user logs in, they get that chosen language/locale. Such a user will find that their shell locale is correct, too, when they open up a terminal window. Job done. User does not need to care where the info is stored or how it works. User never edits a ~/.anything file! It just works.

I think you are trying to "mess with" the guts of how GNOME does things, and (lacking detailed info on exactly how it works) that attempt is apparently confusing you. Since your end users are unlikely to do this kind of thing, your testing should probably do it the way your users will, for maximum fidelity. For one-time quick tests during development, you can of course always do

  LC_ALL=whatever LC_TIME=foobar gnomesword &

type of things, this sets the locale vars for that one process (and its subprocesses) only. The shell has allowed this for many years, probably decades, and this is not GNOME or Ubuntu specific in any way. If you want to test GNOME menus, then I think you need to be starting GNOME the way end users will, not trying to manually tweak it, if you want the tests to be valid for real life users.

Do you really truly need more that this? Is there really a bug here? If so, what exactly is the bug?

I'd suggest closing this as NOTABUG at this point. But that's just my opinion.

If you have a question (as opposed to a bug), then you could try using LaunchPad "Answers" to ask it, and see if you get a solid answer to it there. It might be good to phrase the question in terms of the user requirement "how do I achieve result X", rather than in terms of the method "how do I get GNOME to read locale settings from shell initialization file Y", for best results.

Jonathan