GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 302164
"POSIX/C English" should be removed or renamed to something understandable
Last modified: 2010-06-04 19:41:04 UTC
Distribution/Version: Ubuntu 5.04 Steps to reproduce: 1. From the login screen, click "Language...". 2. Look at the list of languages. What you see, among other options: * "POSIX/C English" This option means nothing to Aunt Tillie, or even to Cousin Emiliana looking for the Polish English locale. It seems to be a bug that people forgot to report in 2002 <http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2002-July/msg00191.html>.
The attached link nor this bug report indicates how "POSIX/C English" should be changed. Please advise. THe following tow lines from gui/gdmlanguages.c need to likely change. gdmlanguages.c: /* This is the POSIX/C locale for english, should really be in Other */ gdmlanguages.c: { N_("Other|POSIX/C English"), "C", "POSIX/C English", 0 },
I don't exactly how it should be changed because I'm one of the people experiencing the bug -- that is, I'm one of the people who can't work out what the heck "POSIX/C English" means. :-) And Google's not much help. What I do know is that neither Windows nor OS X have that option. This may be because they are technically inferior in some way, but that they don't need to mention "POSIX/C" makes their interface design better in that detail. I suggest a back-and-forth session between a designer and yourself to work out how to rename or remove the option. That could happen in this bug report, though IRC would be faster.
Adding Calum Benson to the cc:list so we can get a UI designers opinion on how this should look.
If this bug report is the most convenient place to design it, then I suppose the most useful first questions are: 1. What would be wrong with calling it "English (US)"? 2. Why does the code say "should really be in Other"?
calum: *ping*
Not sure I know enough about the technicalities of the POSIX/C locale to make any great suggestions here, but I'd echo mpt's comment that if it always equates to US English, then something like "English (US)" seems pretty reasonable. Two questions spring to mind: - Would techy types ever need to know that they were selecting the POSIX/C locale? If so, we might still want to indicate it somehow. - Would it somehow be possible to accidentally end up with two "English (US)" options on the list if we renamed this one?
My suggestion is to simply remove the "English" part only - "POSIX/C English" + "POSIX/C" C locale is not a language but developer users need the option on GUI. http://opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xbd/locale.html#tag_005_002
That might be more accurate, but it wouldn't solve this bug, because it still wouldn't be understandable to non-developers. Setting back to NEW because I can't provide any further information without someone answering the questions I asked in comment 4.
This problem has been fixed in our software repository. The fix will go into the next software release. Thank you for your bug report.