Comment 4 for bug 742857

Thanks David and Matthew for your comments! To be honest, I'm a little surprised, since I did have a user documentation on the topic "i18n in Ubuntu" in mind when I wrote it, not just a language-selector manual. My concern was rather that you would miss things. ;-)

A couple of weeks ago I was about to review and update the i18n docs, since there have been some not unsignificant i18n changes in Natty. However, the only i18n related document I found was this outdated (language-selector isn't mentioned) page in the wiki:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Locale

Making software available in many languages is a key point in the Ubuntu philosophy:
http://www.ubuntu.com/project/about-ubuntu/our-philosophy

That's one good reason IMO to include i18n in the official documentation. Isn't it kind of weird that "Visual Effects" is covered in considerable detail under "Customizing Your Computer", while i18n isn't mentioned at all?

Of course, there is always room for discussing the level of detail. David questions the section on LC_* variables, and Matthew the section on the $LANGUAGE priority list. So let's take a closer look.

I uploaded the linked branches to my PPA:
https://launchpad.net/~gunnarhj/+archive/i18n-docs

Suggest that you install the packages, to see the document in its context. The next best option is to download the i18n.xml file and view it in the help browser:

yelp file:///full/path/to/i18n.xml

The document is divided into 5 pages:
1. Introduction
2. gettext Language Handling
3. Language Support
4. Login Screen
5. Advanced Format Settings

Page 1 and 4 are so short, so I don't comment on them now.

Page 3 consists of user guidance to the Language Support tool (i.e. language-selector). I'm proposing a "Help" button on the main language-selector window that takes you directly to page 3, so besides being the most central part of the i18n document, the third page serves as a context help page for language-selector.

I think that the widget in language-selector for setting language(s) motivates a simple description of the priority list feature. That's what page 2 is for. I'd say it's pretty far from "the nuts and bolts of gettext", Matthew. :-) There is also a link to page 2 from the comment on page 3 on the language setting widget.

Page 5 is there because of a limitation of the language-selector UI compared to corresponding UIs in some other operating systems. The word "advanced" in the title emphasizes that the page is not for everyone.

Btw, when I now look at page 5, I think it is too long. Think the variable list should be reduced to the 4 or 5 variables that it's most likely that people want to control individually.

I'd suppose that the vast majority of our users don't need language-selector or an i18n document. They just set a language at installation and that's it. The proposed document is not for them. It's for users who want to get a basic understanding of Ubuntu's i18n model, and be able to conveniently change the settings to match their preferences. And it may be useful to point at for people who work with bugs or answer questions.