[Bug 1907914] Re: default locale when selecting english(US) and belgian timezone is incorrect

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson]

On 2021-03-19 19:37, Amedee Van Gasse wrote:
> This bug is a duplicate of a bug first reported way back in 2014:

That's formally correct. But since this bug was submitted, I had
forgotten about the other bug, and a fix referring to this one was
implemented, I marked it the other way around. Doesn't matter in
practice - you are here now, right? :)

On 2021-03-19 19:42, Amedee Van Gasse wrote:
> How is this problem solved in other countries with multiple
> languages, for example Switzerland?

Switzerland seems to have the same situation:

$ grep _CH /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED | grep 'UTF-8'
de_CH.UTF-8 UTF-8
fr_CH.UTF-8 UTF-8
it_CH.UTF-8 UTF-8
wae_CH UTF-8

I.e. the installer picks de_CH.UTF-8 if the user selects English as
language. But since German is spoken by the majority in Switzerland,
it's a sensible default and there is no problem to solve. Besides the
"political" one then, but users in countries like Belgium and
Switzerland have to live with that. The installer does not have a
mechanism for setting the formats locale explicitly, and it can easily
be tweaked afterwards in Settings.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1907914

Title:
  default locale when selecting english(US) and belgian timezone is
  incorrect

Status in ubiquity package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released

Bug description:
  When installing ubuntu (20.04 and later (earlier also probably))selecting
  - english (US) language
  - Brussels-Belgian timezone

  ubuntu selects de_BE as locale which is teh Belgian German-language
  locale

  in Belgium about 60% are dutch-speaking (nl_BE) and 40% are french
  speaking (fr_BE) and less than 1% are german speaking (de_BE)-->
  choosing de_BE seems to be a bad default value

  related ubiquity code is here :
  https://git.launchpad.net/ubiquity/tree/scripts/localechooser-apply

  it seems when a language (en) is selected for Belgium which is not
  available as a locale (i.e. en-BE) the locale de_BE is chosen using
  this code

  -- code --
    combined="$(grep ' UTF-8' /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED | \
     grep "${deflang}_$COUNTRY[.@ ]" | head -n1 | \
     cut -d' ' -f1)"
  -- code --

  de_BE is chosen as I suppose it is alphabetically before fr_BE and
  nl_BE

  I'm not sure what the best solution is

  I'd propose the following changes in order of my preference
  1. add a en_BE locale (https://www.localeplanet.com/icu/en-BE/index.html) and make that default for non wa, nl, fr and de languages
  2. allow user to select nl_BE or fr_BE locale when installing ubuntu (and maybe also de_BE or wa_BE which have much smaller % of people in Belgium) - may require a change of ubuntu install process - but I guess Belgium is not the only country with several languages with similar issues : Switzerland, ...
  3. set default language nl for Belgium (might be politically problematic for 40% of Belgian people) but makes more sense than de

  related AskUbuntu question : https://askubuntu.com/questions/1299522
  /belgian-formats-when-choosing-us-language-regional-language-settings-
  issue

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