Comment 6 for bug 407300

While the patch fixes the issue where Xsession was writing a LANGUAGE variable with incorrect syntax, now we've got a situation where:

• GDM can only write LANG (and the LC_xx categories)
• language-selector can write LANGUAGE
• That effectively means that the language one selects in GDM is useless, since LANGUAGE has precedence
• In some applications LANG (or LC_xxx) is used, though.

As a test, in my Catalan session I logged out, chose German as the language in GDM, logged back in and noticed:

• Most applications are in Catalan
• The calendar is half Catalan, half German
• Firefox is in German

$ locale
LANG=de_DE.utf8
LANGUAGE=ca_ES@valencia:ca_ES:ca:en_GB:en
LC_CTYPE="de_DE.utf8"
LC_NUMERIC="de_DE.utf8"
LC_TIME="de_DE.utf8"
LC_COLLATE="de_DE.utf8"
LC_MONETARY="de_DE.utf8"
LC_MESSAGES="de_DE.utf8"
LC_PAPER="de_DE.utf8"
LC_NAME="de_DE.utf8"
LC_ADDRESS="de_DE.utf8"
LC_TELEPHONE="de_DE.utf8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="de_DE.utf8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="de_DE.utf8"
LC_ALL=

This can be potentially very confusing to users switching locales.

Arne, could you comment on this? Should we open a separate bug?