1964056 - Changing system language from en-US to en-GB causes language settings to break

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Settings UI, defect)

Description

[Anselm Schüler]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:137.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/137.0

Steps to reproduce:

1. Had German language pack installed and English (US) set as preferred interface language over German, and English, then German, as preferred page languages.
2. Change my system locale settings from:

   LANG=en_US.UTF-8
   LC_ADDRESS=de_DE.UTF-8
   LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8
   LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
   LC_IDENTIFICATION=en_US.UT
   LC_MONETARY=de_DE.UTF-8
   LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
   LC_MEASUREMENT=de_DE.UTF-8
   LC_NAME=en_US.UTF-8
   LC_NUMERIC=en_US.UTF-8
   LC_PAPER=de_DE.UTF-8
   LC_TELEPHONE=de_DE.UTF-8
   LC_TIME=en_GB.UTF-8
   

   to

   LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
   LC_ADDRESS=de_DE.UTF-8
   LC_COLLATE=en_GB.UTF-8
   LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8
   LC_IDENTIFICATION=en_GB.UT
   LC_MONETARY=de_DE.UTF-8
   LC_MESSAGES=en_GB.UTF-8
   LC_MEASUREMENT=de_DE.UTF-8
   LC_NAME=en_GB.UTF-8
   LC_NUMERIC=en_GB.UTF-8
   LC_PAPER=de_DE.UTF-8
   LC_TELEPHONE=de_DE.UTF-8
   LC_TIME=en_GB.UTF-8
   

Actual results:

I can no longer select the German language for spellcheck. The context menu entry "Languages" only lists "English (United Kingdom)" and "English (United States)". I am able to select multiple of these, but when I navigate to a new page, only the most recently enabled of the two remains enabled.

When I go to preferences and go to the interface language dialogue, I am not able to remove "English (US)", but I am able to remove "English (UK)".

Expected results:

I should be able to use the German spellcheck dictionary.
I should be able to remove the US English language pack.

Comment 1

[Anselm Schüler]

Attachment: Spellcheck language selection context menu

Comment 2

[Anselm Schüler]

Attachment: English (UK) can be removed

Comment 3

[Anselm Schüler]

Attachment: English (US) cannot be removed

Comment 4

[Anselm Schüler]

Attachment: German can be removed

Comment 5

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

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Firefox::Settings UI' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 6

[Anselm Schüler]

Uninstalling and reinstalling the German language pack from the add-ons website does not resolve the issue.

Comment 7

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Eemeli, who could investigate this and is this just a Core :i18n/l10n bug?

Comment 8

[Eemeli Aro [:eemeli]]

I'm not really sure who'd be best placed to investigate this; someone familiar with our spellchecking? I'm also not quite sure how exactly we're packaging things for the Linux builds.

The "English (US)" UI language not being uninstallable is almost certainly because it's not installed as a langpack, but as a part of the browser itself.

Anselm, could you take a look at what languages you see under the Dictionaries section of about:addons? And if there is one listed for "English (US)", does removing that change how the German ones show up in the context menu?

Comment 9

[Anselm Schüler]

I will upload screenshots of what I see in about:addons.

There is no "English (US)" listed.

Comment 10

[Anselm Schüler]

Attachment: about:addons Languages

Comment 11

[Anselm Schüler]

Attachment: about:addons Dictionaries

Comment 12

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

Hey eemeli,

Anselm came back with the requested information - does this make anything clearer?

Comment 13

[Eemeli Aro [:eemeli]]

Yeah, it looks like for some reason the German dictionaries are not getting installed together with the langpack. I'm not sure why.

To fix the situation in this particular case it ought to be enough to install the German dictionary directly, after which it should show up in the context menu.

I'm not sure how to solve the general case of why this is happening in the first place, if it's e.g. something specific to our Linux builds.

Comment 14

[Anselm Schüler]

If I remember correctly, then a German dictionary was available before I changed my locale.
Which is odd, because the previous locale wasn’t German either.

Comment 15

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

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:jhirsch, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 16

[Anselm Schüler]

I think it's important for me to note that this isn't a build downloaded from the official Mozilla website, I'm running a build from nixpkgs on NixOS.
I don't know if this issue could be a result from that.

Comment 17

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

That may very well be involved. Hey @sylvestre, can you remind me what we do in situations like this, where we might be hitting an issue caused by how a distro is packaging Firefox (in this case, NixOS)? Do we just file a bug with them in https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues and reference this bug?

Comment 18

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

yeah, please test with our binaries https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/linux/ to see if you can reproduce
if you can not reproduce your issue, it is probably a packaging bug and should be reported on the nix side

Comment 19

[Anselm Schüler]

Will testing a Flatpak build suffice?
Otherwise I still can try to get the binary running.

Comment 20

[Anselm Schüler]

by "a Flatpak build" I meant the Flathub build https://flathub.org/apps/org.mozilla.firefox, sorry

Comment 21

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

Please try with the binaries.
snap/flatpak can also change the behavior of the program

Comment 22

[Anselm Schüler]

(In reply to Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre] from comment #21)

Please try with the binaries.
snap/flatpak can also change the behavior of the program

I can try that but I can’t promise I’ll get to it anytime soon

Comment 23

[Chiaki Akimoto]

Attachment: image.png

This will help you solve bug

Comment 24

[David Lawrence [:dkl]]

The content of attachment 9506223 [details] has been deleted for the following reason:

Deleted