https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=624158
Adam Williamson awilliam@redhat.com changed:
What |Removed |Added ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- CC| |awilliam@redhat.com
--- Comment #16 from Adam Williamson awilliam@redhat.com --- Bill - the revival of this bug is due to https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=872282 , where we've found another obvious case, Chinese-speaking locales.
There are details in that bug, but to give a summary, there are four official Chinese locales: zh_CN (China itself, the People's Republic), zh_SG (Singapore), zh_TW (Taiwan/ROC), zh_HK (Hong Kong SAR).
We also noted that the case really exists in English too, except we don't notice it, because the _default_ fallback is to English (well, C, which in practice is English). So if you set en_UK and whatever you're reading doesn't have a 'UK English' translation, you get English anyway.
Anyhow, the Chinese case is much like the Arabian or Low German cases or UK English vs. U.S. English. There's really only two major variants of written Chinese, traditional and simplified. China and Chinese-speaking Singaporeans usually use simplified, and Hong Kong and Taiwan usually use traditional. zh_CN is used as the universal 'simplified Chinese' locale - so Singaporean users usually use the zh_CN locale - and Taiwan is used as the universal 'traditional Chinese' locale - so HK users usually use the zh_TW locale. Translations usually don't exist for the zh_HK and zh_SG locales. In the past we actually labelled zh_CN as 'Chinese (Simplifed)' and zh_TW as 'Chinese (Traditional)' in the installer, with no reference to the actual place, and only offered those choices.
Still, there may be other locale stuff that differs between Hong Kong and Taiwan and between Singapore and China, and there _are_ a few cases where written usage differs between the locales, so it would be good if we could allow users to pick the actual place they live, and if they pick Hong Kong or Singapore, use the locale info for those places and translations if actually available, but fall back on zh_TW or zh_CN (respectively) translations if 'native' translations aren't available. Setting the LANGUAGE variable would allow this.
It almost goes without saying, of course, that Chinese-speaking people are at least _potentially_ a gigantic user base, so covering their use cases well would be a good move.
I don't know if anything's changed in terms of there being a central canonical upstream reference for providing the necessary relationship data in the last couple of years, but it may be worth checking, and if there isn't, even trying to kickstart one. Ubuntu is still using the LANGUAGE var, apparently, so they're presumably maintaining the data somewhere.