GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 777754
Failure to recognise installed help system
Last modified: 2017-09-20 17:48:12 UTC
I am in the UK, and have just installed GIMP 2.8.18 and gimp-help-2-2.8.2-en_GB-setup.exe on a new Windows 10 PC. My Windows system is set to "English (United Kingdom)". With the GIMP default Preferences|Interface|Language (System Language), I am told "The GIMP user manual is not installed on your computer". Everything is OK once I've selected the language as "English [en_GB]" and restarted GIMP. Obviously, I've found a workaround, but a bit of delving in the registry shows that Windows stores my language as en-GB (with a hyphen) whereas GIMP uses en_GB (with an underscore). I have no idea whether other operating systems use hyphens or underscores, but the solution to this bug is to translate any hyphen in localised language codes to an underscore (or vice versa).
Thanks for reporting. Hmm… I thought that this was a known issue and there would be a bug report already, but I can't find it. Wasn't there also a problem that if you have en-US help installed but your GIMP is en-GB, it won't show it? I know that there are idiomatic differences, but I wonder if our help system should not be a little clever when regional language variants are available and at least propose to show them instead of the exact language help. Would be friendlier. Anyway this should be checked and fixed if confirmed.
Ok so if it is in the format "en-GB", it looks like the IETF format for language tag, whereas GIMP uses the POSIX locale syntax, which is quite different. I made the following commit which should at least take care of your issue with en-GB vs en_GB: commit 53465942f83ee5807a9e6e101c123efbbcda80e4 Author: Jehan <jehan@girinstud.io> Date: Wed Feb 1 00:53:39 2017 +0100 Bug 777754 - Failure to recognise installed help system. It seems that the Windows platform could sometimes return locales in the form en-GB (so an IETF language tag, I guess) instead of a POSIX locale. This little hack should take care of the easy cases until we get a better and generic fix. -------------------------- Though if really Windows returns the IETF format, this one can get much more complicated and not that easily fixed by just replacing an hyphen by an underscore. Like apparently we could get nan-Hant-TW or zh-Hant-TW, which definitely don't translate well by replacing hyphens! Therefore I am not closing this bug report with this. I will want to actually test on Windows and try and reproduce this issue later on.
Alan, can you confirm the fix on 2.8.22?
Yes, I have uninstalled and then reinstalled 2.8.22 and can confirm the fix.
Thanks. I don't close yet because I wish to improve the whole language recognition system to be a bit clever as well if possible when I can make the time for this.
Opening bug 787951 for further improvements of the help system. Closing this one as FIXED.