Strange upgrade behaviour

[Michael Bauer]

Sgrìobh ubuntu-translators-request at lists.ubuntu.com na leanas 28/11/2014 
aig 11:59:
> Most users prefer that you can set the display language once and that
> it's effective all over the desktop.
Really? Care to quote your source on these figures? I think (on both 
sides of the argument) we make assumptions about user behaviour without 
bothering to ever ask the user. This is very much reminiscent of 
councillors in Scotland arguing that bilingual road signs put off 
tourists when *actual* research with tourists show that they like them 
because it adds to the 'sense of place'.
> Doing it per app instead is an idea
> that would be hard to sell.
Again, really? This has been a common feature for many years. Take 
Firefox, you pick a locale, you download it. VLC - picks the OS locale 
but allows you to change. Virtually all programs that had different 
languages on offer that I grew up with allowed you somehow to change the 
UI language if you didn't want it for some reason. This force-locale 
nonsense has only come in in the last decade or so. To anyone whose 
preferred language is not one of the big 20, the hard sell is that they 
*cannot* pick their own choice. And just because the big 20 account for 
a large percentage of official state languages, that does not make them 
the preferred language of the majority of people.
> As always there are workarounds, though. While I usually have Swedish as
> the selected display language in Language Support, I prefer English in
> Thunderbird and gnome-terminal. It's accomplished with these two  files:
>
> $ cat ~/bin/thunderbird
> #!/bin/sh
> export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
> exec /usr/bin/thunderbird $@
>
> $ cat ~/bin/gnome-terminal
> #!/bin/sh
> export LANGUAGE=en_US
> exec /usr/bin/gnome-terminal $@
Sweet. You know, this kind of solution is largely the reason why 
anything Linux based is hard to sell to the 'majority'.

Michael