Bug 319748

Summary:	Antique, invalid encoding is used
Product:	[Applications] systemsettings	Reporter:	Denys <rtvd>
Component:	kcm_language	Assignee:	John Layt <jlayt>
Status:	RESOLVED DOWNSTREAM
Severity:	grave	CC:	cfeck
Priority:	NOR
Version:	4.10.2
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	Ubuntu
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Denys 2013-05-12 21:13:44 UTC

After selecting some regional settings the locale has ISO-8859-1 encoding. More than that, this encoding is used even if the language cannot be represented in it.

Example:
LANG=uk_UA.ISO-8859-1



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Try selecting any country or langauge in regional settings and click OK.
2. Open a terminal and run "locale"
3. Observe that a stone-age ISO-8859-1 encoding is used.
Actual Results:  
ISO-8859-1 encoding is used and there is no way to change that.
That's a total disaster.
The console does not show anything but question marks for file names which are not in Latin.

A lot of time wasted for many users all over the globe. Typical.

Expected Results:  
UTF-8 encoding is to be used ALWAYS.

Example:
LANG=uk_UA.UTF-8

And I expect to see text, not lots of question marks in the console.

Last time I checked it was year 2013 and all normal people switched to Unicode decades ago.

Comment 1 Christoph Feck 2013-05-13 00:11:35 UTC

This does not happen here, and, as far as I know, changing the KDE locale/language settings has never changed system locale/language. Does Ubuntu use a distro specific patch?

Comment 2 Denys 2013-05-13 08:35:52 UTC

I have no idea. :-(

So far I am using an ugly workaround. I changed the content of .env/kde/setlocale.sh manually, and then made that file and its parent directory be read only.

This file and its parent directory are not present in Fedora 17 or Ubuntu 12.10.

Comment 3 John Layt 2013-05-13 09:26:35 UTC

Hi.  Firstly, sarcastic bug reports tend not to get a high priority around here, being polite does.  I'm only replying this quickly as Christoph has.  Secondly, setting the language in standard KDE does nothing to the system encoding or locale.  What you have hit are Kubuntu-specific custom modifications that change the system locale and obviously don't do it correctly.  Please raise this as a (polite) issue in Kubuntu's Launchpad.

Comment 4 Denys 2013-05-14 07:52:54 UTC

Fair enough.

Firstly, sorry for the sarcastic tone.

Secondly, I do not know how exactly does KDE work and I hope I will not have to. Noone can or should know everything in detail. And while the root cause can be something Ubuntu specific, it is also true that other desktop environments work fine. And more than that, the .kde/env/setlocale.sh is actually updated when I change region or language in KDE. That's why my working hypothesis has always been that something in KDE does it.

In any case, I am not going to report any bugs anywhere for the foreseeable future.
I have spent enough time last half a year on reporting the bugs in Linux. The bugs which prevent me from doing very basic things. And the cost of that time was enough to buy a few new Mac Book Pro so I think it is sensible to try a different OS. Which is sad beyond measure as I was with Linux for about 15 years.

It also does not help that even figuring out where to report the bug is a challenge. For example, how do you tell what is the difference between kmail and kmail2? Let's say I have kmail-4.9.5. Is it the old one or kmail2? And who exactly owns the "synaptics" application which configures the touchpad? There are big problems with it and it is not clear who to report them to. But, as I mentioned earlier, it is time for a stop. No more bug reporting, no more wasted time.

Comment 5 Denys 2013-05-14 07:55:14 UTC

P.S. Good luck guys. In any case KDE is superior comparing to Unity and Gnome 3 (and all its derivatives).