743385 - Improve BCP 47 support in Languages preference dialog

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Settings UI, defect, P3)

Description

[Gordon P. Hemsley [:GPHemsley]]

Continuing from the discussion in bug 730625, here's what I'm thinking:

* Revamp the code in browser/components/preferences/languages.js so that it can process language tags à la bug 730209 and bug 741842.
* Include every language in toolkit/locales/en-US/chrome/global/languageNames.properties by default.
* Use intl/locale/src/language.properties only to:
** Include more specific language tags (with regions, scripts, etc.)
** Turn off a language from languageNames.properties
* Remove the l10n strings 'languageCodeFormat' and 'languageRegionCodeFormat' from /browser/locales/en-US/chrome/browser/preferences/preferences.properties, since:
** Each subtag name is its own independent entity, so the combination of them all should not need to be localized.
** We'd need a whole bunch more strings to cover the possibilities BCP 47 support would allow.
** Nobody ever seems to localize them anyway.

None of this should be a problem, except if there are other parts of the code that use language.properties. A quick search didn't turn up anything specific, but there are a number of references to including the file in mobile builds. (That is, the file is included, but I didn't see it ever being used.)

Thoughts?

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The bug assignee is inactive on Bugzilla, so the assignee is being reset.

Comment 2

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

I'm not 100% sure if what's being asked for is still relevant. What do you think Greg?

Comment 3

[Greg Tatum [:gregtatum]]

At the very least this is a very broad issue and I'm unclear that there is a specific goal here other than broad thoughts. I think it's fine to mark it as invalid.