GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 202982
Doesn't handle Spanish surnames properly.
Last modified: 2013-09-10 13:52:52 UTC
In Spain and in other countries two surnames are used: - The father's one - The mother's one So, for example, my name is David Marin Carreño. David: first name Marin: first surname (father's one) Carreño: second surname (mother's one) If I enter "David Marin Carreño" as Complete name, the only possibilities I have to "Save as" are: - Carreño, David - David Carreño I (and a lot of Spanish speakers) would like to save these complete names also as: - Marin Carreño, David - David Marin Carreño It would be nice if these are the defaults when LANG=es or other countries where both surnames are used.
This is a fairly significant issue (I sometimes feel like I'm the only Latin American without a first surname), and perhaps allowing more flexibility here instead of trying to automatically do everything might also some of the issues related to Jr/MD/etc after last names.
This is handled by letting the user edit the name by hand. That's what the Full Name button is for. If that doesn't work, that's a different bug. I don't think we want it to change based on locale.
I think that this attitude discriminates Spanish and Latin American users: use that button instead of enter data quickly. The fact is that the "Full Name" entry doesn't work well for Spanish speaking countries where we use two surnames as "full name". And this is a bug. Yes, we can use "Full Name" button and then enter it well. But if one-surname-using people doesn't, why we, two-surname-using people must do it, if this is the default layout for our surnames? Furthermore: the "middle name" isn't very usual, at least in Spain. A lot of people has compound first-name, as "Juan Carlos", "José Luis"... Perhaps a solution could be defining a general "Standard full name layout" option in Addressbook preferences with some alternatives: * [prefix] 1st-name [middlename] surname [, suffix] * [prefix] 1st-name [middlename] 1st-surname 2nd-surname [, suffix] * [prefix] 1st-name [other parts of 1st-name] 1st-surname 2nd-surname [,suffix] Another reason for considering this as a bug: Spanish Outlook Express do this well, and Evolution doesn't.
Changing the summary to describe the bug more accurately.
Hrm. Saying it 'discriminates' is perhaps going a bit overboard. It doesn't handle the case well; but given that we aren't producing separate pieces of proprietary software it isn't terribly easy to do this type of thing. Since there is a workaround in the form of editing the full name, I'm going to re-triage this.
It would simplify things if you could override the default parsing in easy ways, eg by typing: Marin Carreño, David for the name. Although this wouldn't help with double-first-name vs first+middle... So maybe it could let you do David (Marin Carreño) (Mary Ann) Singleton etc. Except that that's silly of course. :) I think changing the default parsing rules based on locale makes perfect sense: the current rules weren't designed in a vacuum, they were designed around the assumptions that en_US people make about how names are formed, which aren't good everywhere.
This work pretty nice in 1.5 Francisco Gerardo Marin Paz is correctly parsed as Marin Paz, Francisco and being offered in File as with Francisco Marin Paz. It misses middle name (Gerardo), but that's covered by another report. So closing as fixed
Sorry, but I've marked this bug as reopened because with your particular name (with two names and two surnames), it works. But it doesn't work with only one name, and two surnames. (No middle name). In this particular case (that happens very often in Spain), the first surname is always ommited (as the program thinks it is a middle name, not a surname). Reopening the bug... ;-)
Yeah, right. It discards the first surname (I think it guesses is a middle name) and no choice is in dropdown.
To handle multi-word last names, enter, say, "Montero Luque, Carlos" in the "File Under" text box, rather than entering it in the "Name" text box. We should definitely offer more variations in the "File Under" dropdown... Currently if you type Name1 Name2 Name3 into the "Full Name" it gives you "Name3, Name1" or "Name1 Name3" as your file-under options. It should offer those, plus "Name2 Name3, Name1." Or even "Name2, Name1" .... basically every combination should be available. It's a dropdown, it won't get above... well, probably not more than twelve items.... And, as last resort, which I know isn't proper, accurate, or really acceptable at all, you can use a hyphen to turn them into a single word.
Trying to reactivate this bug. A bad experience related with this: Recently I sync'ed my palm pilot with E-D-S. I got zillions of double entrys caused by the «inteligent» surname managment of Evo. OTOH you should consider Evo is distributed as the main WG client for the most of Spanish institutional distros, with thousend of hundreds of personal and goverment final users. All of them deserves the right managment of their cultural conventions.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 202140 ***