Is your language missing an entry in GDM?

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

Read this if you don't know if your language is properly listed in GDM,
or you don't know what GDM is. :)


The GNOME login screen (GDM) displays a list of languages for the user
to choose from when logging in. By choosing a language, the users get
their GNOME session translated into this language, basically given that
there are translations for this language of course. This is often the
easiest way to use the GNOME translations. If I want to use the Danish
translations, I simply select "Danish" when logging in (through GDM).

The list of languages in GDM isn't updated automatically. You have to
explicitly request for your language to be included in the list, if it
isn't already, and provide the information necessary for it to be
included. This has to be done and resolved before the upcoming GNOME 2.8
string freeze, since the language names themselves are also supposed to
be translated into other languages by other translators.


The best way to request this is through Bugzilla. Follow these steps:

1) Make sure you have some GNOME translations for your language in CVS.
If you don't, there's no point in requesting an entry in the login
screen for this language (other than perhaps false advertizing
purposes). You can and probably should wait until you have some
translations in CVS.

2) Make sure your language isn't already in the GDM list of languages.
You can check this by looking at
http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/gdm2/gui/gdmlanguages.c?view=markup
Make sure your language is listed and that it has the proper native name
of your language listed aswell. If it does, all is well, and you don't
need to do anything.

If it doesn't, go on with step 3.

3) Report a bug in Bugzilla against GDM. You can do this with the
following link:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=gdm&op_sys=All&keywords=string,L10N&cc=menthos menthos com

Write a suitable topic for your bug report, and a short and suitably
descriptive text about the problem ("I want this language to be included
in the GDM language list..." or something like that).
At the very least, you should include the following information:

* The name of the language in English.
* A suitable locale associated with the language (example: "sv_SE" for
Swedish in Sweden)
* The native name of this language, encoded in UTF-8. Attach this as a
text attachment to the bug report, otherwise Bugzilla will probably
munge the encoding.

4) Click Submit.


That's it! If you have the powers, attaching a patch aswell that fixes
the problem is always appreciated by maintainers, and may help the issue
to get resolved faster.


Hoping to see more languages with translations listed,
Christian