Norwegian languages sorted weirdly

This is sort of in conflict with bug 39299.

Copying from my comment on bug 186979:

"The languages are sorted by their ISO-639 language code (i.e. the first bit of $LANG). nb < ne < nl < nn (Norsk bokmål, Nepali, Nederlands, Norsk nynorsk).

I acknowledge that it is not perfect, but I'm not convinced that your proposal is fully-specified, and it's exactly this woolliness that has held me back from doing it that way in the past. See bug 39299. The short answer is that there is no sort order that makes sense to speakers of all languages, even if we as English speakers have an intuition that says that it makes sense to sort similar-looking Latin letters together. The current behaviour is a compromise."

Seems like there is no fix possible for this bug, which may not really be classifiable as a bug anyway. Therefore, setting to invalid.

There may indeed be no way to make the sorting look right to everybody. But sorting by an invisible language code makes it look right to practically nobody.

Maybe we should treat both nb and nn as Norwegian (no) for the purposes of sorting, so that they remain together. I'll separate this from the other language sorting bugs since it seems perhaps amenable to a specific solution.

This bug was fixed in the package gfxboot-theme-ubuntu - 0.8.1

---------------
gfxboot-theme-ubuntu (0.8.1) karmic; urgency=low

  * Make menu columns variable-width, to make it easier to fit more
    languages and keymaps onto the screen.
  * Update langlist from langnames.inc, forgotten in 0.8.0 (LP: #311699).
  * Sort Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk next to each other, as if
    their language code were 'no' (LP: #40144).

 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Fri, 12 Jun 2009 21:49:41 +0100