595299 - Thunderbird should use the LANGUAGE instead of the LANG locale variable

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 583793

(Thunderbird :: OS Integration, defect)

Description

[Felix Dreissig]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.9) Gecko/20100830 Ubuntu/10.10 (maverick) Firefox/3.6.9
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.9) Gecko/20100903 Thunderbird/3.1.3

When launched in an localized environment, Thunderbird reads the LANG environment variable instead of LANGUAGE to determine the interface language.

There are setups in which you want to have different values for both variables, e.g. an English user interface with German time/date format and units.

According to [1], "the LANGUAGE environment variable is examined first to determine the message catalogs to be used".

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Set the LANGUAGE environment variable to LANGUAGE=en_US:en
2. Set the LANG environment variable to e.g. LANG=de_de.utf8
3. Launch Thunderbird.
Actual Results:  
If you have the right language pack installed, Thunderbird presents you a German user interface.

Expected Results:  
Present the English user interface.

Correlative Firefox bug: Bug 583793

For information on how environment variables should be handled, see:
[1] http://www.openi18n.org/docs/html/LI18NUX-2000-amd4.htm
[2] http://www.gnu.org/software/hello/manual/gettext/Locale-Environment-Variables.html#Locale-Environment-Variables

Comment 1

[Felix Dreissig]

What I forgot to mention:
A possible workaround is to deactivate the unwanted language pack, but in this case the translated plugins will still use the "wrong" language.

Comment 2

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

Wolfgang does this makes sense ?

Comment 3

[Wolfgang Rosenauer [:wolfiR]]

The other bug is already a Core bug and not limited to Firefox btw.

So to repeat, yes, it makes sense but it would need some work to support it fully.
As noted in the other bug I have a basic patch which I don't consider complete for full support of the spec.
(Therefore there is no patch there but I'm shipping the basic patch with latest Firefox on openSUSE for testing purposes)

Comment 4

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

(In reply to comment #3)
> The other bug is already a Core bug and not limited to Firefox btw.
> 

So shall we duplicate ?