GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 415600
language grouping on the login page by Region
Last modified: 2007-04-10 05:00:24 UTC
Splitting the languages A-M follow by N-Z works very well for en_US locale. However, for languages which are not based on alphanumeric characters such as chinese, japanese, korean and indic, it may cause confusion. Hence, if possible, will it be possible to group the languages into geographic regions such as North America, South America, North Asia, South Asia, Europe, etc.
Red Hat bug: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=196410
This is a good idea. However, I'd like to think about this a bit and make sure that we decide what groupings makes the most sense. Some other user may come alone and say they want the languages grouped a different way. Perhaps it would make sense to make the groupings configurable so that people can change them if they want? Perhaps an extra column could appear in the /etc/X11/gdm/locale.alias file that specifies the menu grouping to use with the mnemonic. Then GDM could just use the grouping specified.
This problem has gone away in GDM 2.19 because now gdmlogin uses the same logic used by gdmgreeter for language selection. In other words, it pops up the same dialog box which works better, supports search (by hitting control-F) and shows the languages in two columns where they are translated into the native language, making it easier to select. I think this resolves the grouping issues that gdmlogin previously had.