Comment 28 for bug 553162

@ Martin
language-selector sets $LANGUAGE for language, and $LANG for other locales. That's why it's inconsistent that gdm sometimes uses $LANG when dealing with the language to be used for message display.

I have attached a modified gdm-patch. These are the news:

- As you pointed out in comment #24, the previous code didn't take into account different syntax variants for setting and exporting $LANGUAGE. Now the code for editing ~/.profile is safer.

- The $LANGUAGE priority list is preserved, as was suggested in comment #27 by YunQiang Su.

- $LC_MESSAGES is set to take care of applications that don't recognize $LANGUAGE.

The third item seems to solve reported problems with Mozilla apps (Firefox/Thunderbird), which means that the solution I provided at bug 550222 already can be regarded as superseded. Also other programs that apparently don't recognize $LANGUAGE, e.g. FileZilla and Cervisia, now display menues etc. in the expected language.

Personally I think we should give high priority to this issue, and try to attain consensus about a solution. I'd be happy to contribute to achieve that goal ( seems like I have started... :) ). I noticed at ubuntu-devel that David Planella asked for suggestions for translation focus aspects with an eye to 11.04. Wouldn't a consensus solution to this issue be a suitable item on the list that David is preparing at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Translations/Roadmaps/11.04 ?