Re: UI change of "Languge" selection in gdm2

[George <jirka 5z com>]

On Sun, Nov 09, 2003 at 07:00:36PM -0800, Jerry Wall wrote:
> In our shared server environments, we have found that having the
> user select their greeter language is beneficial. Inside Sun, we have
> some servers that support populations of users with multiple languages
> in real production. Even in the computer industry where English literacy
> is very common, we feel that delivering all the user experience in native 
> languages is very important. This is one of the areas that really generates
> a large amount of emotion since language is a significant portion of 
> people's cultural identities. 

Yes but there is always a question of how far do you go.  All in all, the
user will select their language really only once (thus my reasoning for this
to be best handled by gnome-session).  Plus it is impossible to "greet"
people that you don't know the language of unless you'd automatically FIRST
ask the language before the username.  There's always a chicken and egg
problem.  And asking for a language before each login would be annoying for
99.9% of users.

Even if you on the fly change the language of the greeter, the user still
has to know how to change the language, so they'll have to know what button
to press to do that anyway.  So no matter what you have to deal with a LITTLE
bit of the "System" language (whatever that is set to) in any case.

IMO the user interface of gdm should be as minimal as possible.  It should be
minimal enough such that this is not a problem.  Any sort of session setup or
any such nonsense is best handled inside the session where we already know
your preferences.

This is not just language, but say even accessibility, left handed vs. right
handed mouse (we handle that with a hack nowdays) etc...  So if there is less
actual user (non-administrator) interface to deal with on the login screen,
the better we are off.

> I do grant the denial of service issue can be real, getting a greeter
> in Russian, Arabic or some other language can be quite confusing
> especially if you do not have the greeter menu locations memorized.
> The best defence that we have come up with is to reap idle sessions
> that have been disconnected.

And if someone makes a nice patch for that I'll be very happy to apply this.
Same goes for a sane language-on-the-fly setting patch, that is, one that
doesn't add any more crack then we've already got.

:)

George

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior
   to all others because you were born in it.
                       -- George Bernard Shaw