Re: [libreoffice-l10n] Can LibO be Customised to be Downloaded in a Native Language?

On Tue, Aug 5, 2014 at 1:53 PM, Michael Bauer <fios@akerbeltz.org> wrote:

> Just filed a bug after some off list suggestions.
> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=82184
>
> It may be accidental and I know projects like LO are always short of folk
> but it's inexcusable. It stumps new/inexperienced users (i.e. most) at a
> point before they even use the program. In terms of usability, it's like
> hiding the Save button three layers down in the UI menu. It should have
> been fixed as a matter of priority when LO first forked, even before
> cleaning code. It's not icing.
A bug report is the way to go.
However, the content of this bug report is quite passive aggressive. It
includes many separate issues while each bug report normally covers a
single issue. Frankly, it does not make it easy to attract a developer to
work on this.
This localization issue is important and it has to be dealt with properly.

Specifically,
1. Bug reports about the installation can be found at
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/buglist.cgi?product=LibreOffice&component=Installation&resolution=---

2. The issue about language sorting already has a bug report, at
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=81786
Most probably, the sorting is based on the language  codes ("de" for
German, etc).
If you notice from the above bug report, the reporter says

"In German locale it is also unsorted. 'Weißrussisch' comes before
'Bulgarisch'."

Well, the language code for Belarus is "be" and for Bulgaria is "bg".
Therefore, the sorting currently is probably by language code.
The language codes and language names are probably stored in a data
structure that makes it easy to change the sorting from language code to
language name.
It is probably a one-line code change and it is something that we can
easily try ourselves and produce a patch!

3. There is another bug report, "Default Installer Language",
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63827
The desktop session of the user has some system locale, and the installer
picks the system locale to show messages in the installer.
If a user wants a specific other language, they should change the operating
system settings so their desktop session has a different locale (every
operating system has a way to change these).
In the bug report, Andras Timar mentions that, once the Installer has
started in a specific language, then it is not possible to switch the
messages of the installer in another language.
I can think of a few workarounds, such as an additional multilingual
installer, that offers to select the installer language and then will run
the normal installer with our selected language settings.
Any workaround requires some thinking so as not to interfere with the
common case where we want the language to be autodetected.

4. For some cases it might be beneficial to build installation packages
that show messages in a specific language only.
That is, create installers that have the language hard-coded in them, which
also include all relevant material for a language (spelling, etc).
It is possible to do such a thing. That is, set up the software building
environment that will automatically build installation packages for
specific languages.

Simos

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