Scott recently noted that we don’t have Klingon available in Ubuntu. Klingon is available in ISO 639, so adding it should be straight forward.
Last time I blogged about this three packages needed changing, as well as Launchpad needing a translation team for the language. The situation is a little better now: only two packages need changing as gdm now dynamically looks for languages based on installed locales.
libx11 still needs changing – a minimal diff would be:
=== modified file 'nls/compose.dir.pre' --- libx11-1.2.1/nls/compose.dir.pre +++ libx11-1.2.1/nls/compose.dir.pre @@ -406,0 +406,1 @@ +en_US.UTF-8/Compose: tlh_GB.UTF-8 === modified file 'nls/locale.alias.pre' --- libx11-1.2.1/nls/locale.alias.pre +++ libx11-1.2.1/nls/locale.alias.pre @@ -1083,0 +1083,1 @@ +tlh_GB.utf8: tlh_GB.UTF-8 === modified file 'nls/locale.dir.pre' --- libx11-1.2.1/nls/locale.dir.pre +++ libx11-1.2.1/nls/locale.dir.pre @@ -429,0 +429,1 @@ +en_US.UTF-8/XLC_LOCALE: tlh_GB.UTF-8
Secondly, langpack-locales has to change for two reasons. Firstly a locale definition has to be added (and locales define a place – a language and locale information like days of the week, phone number formatting etc. Secondly the language needs to be added to the SUPPORTED list in that package, so that language packs are generated from Launchpad translations.
Now, gdmautodetects, but it turns out that only ‘complete’ locales were being shown. And that on Ubuntu, this was not looking at language pack directories, rather at
/usr/share/locale
which langpack-built packages do not install translations into. So it could be a bit random about whether a language shows up in gdm. Martin Pitt has kindly turned on the ‘with-incomplete-locales’ configure flag to gdm, and this will permit less completely translated locales to show up (when their langpack is installed – without the langpack nothing will show up).
Code happens 