1745137 - Thunderbird on Linux ignores system locale and starts with an English UI

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Carsten Schoenert]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0

Steps to reproduce:

Thunderbird packages build for Debian doesn't pick the system locales and will start with an English UI as long the user hasn't selected the preferred language within the settings, no matter that the language package for the system locale is already installed.

Actual results:

Debian users of Thunderbird 91.x versions complaining about they need to select the UI language even if the language pack for Thunderbird in the desired language is installed.

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=997863
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=997841

Expected results:

The current seen behaviour didn't happen with the previous ESR version 78.x of Thunderbird. It might be that the detection of the underlying system locale has changed for Thunderbird 91.x.

A similar misbehaviour was also happen while Thunderbird 60.x did start.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1437480
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1413866

As outcome from this change we did adding a default global wide setting

pref("intl.locale.requested", "");

which did working until Thunderbird 91.x.

Comment 1

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

(Based on emails elsewhere it's not 91.4, but before, so not caused by bug 1728744)

Any ideas of what changed?

And maybe Thunderbird should add a pref("intl.locale.requested", ""); by default?

Comment 2

[Carsten Schoenert]

This issue has been solved and was not grounded on some modification within the upstream source that was happen between 78.x and 91.x.!

Some users have figured out what was wrong. Debian uses a patch inside Firefox and Thunderbird) that is adding an extra folder were the application is looking for global settings. This is used later to read any *.js files from /etc/thunderbird/pref/ by a symlinking the folder that is added by this patch to the folder in /etc.

It turned out that this patch was getting broken between the version 78.x and 91.x while the new ESR version of Thunderbird was prepared. The patch in question is fixed already and will get include into TB 91.5.0 and later.