Bug 446154

Changing version to '9' as part of upcoming Fedora 9 GA.
More information and reason for this action is here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping

What does this have to do with glibc?

nothing afaict

Isn't the collation order determined by glibc?

Yes, and?  If you sort a list with words from many different languages, you
cannot expect any fixed order.  Only characters of the same script can really be
compared, the rest is up to implementation details.

If the original request was to change the collation definition to fit somebody's
fancy then all I have to say: get lost!

Just sort the list by hand, only then can you get the order you want and never
be surprised.

(In reply to comment #5)
> If you sort a list with words from many different languages, you
> cannot expect any fixed order.

Ok: you mean different implementations may give different orders?  Hmm, I see.
Why doesn't Unicode define such an ordering for different scripts?
It seems defining such an order would be useful.

> If the original request was to change the collation definition to fit somebody's
> fancy then all I have to say: get lost!
> 
> Just sort the list by hand, only then can you get the order you want and never
> be surprised.

I was just wondering why a few scripts sort before ascii and most after.
Is it the idea not to prefer ascii in the ordering?

For gdm ((well all apps really;)) I would suggest listing language names using
Latin characters first and then other scripts.  I don't know how to order
non-ascii scripts
relative to each other.  Perhaps either by locale name or by codepoints would
make sense.

Looking at the code...

We have a language chooser widget which derives from a chooser widget.  The
chooser widget sorts by it's id column.  For the language chooser widget, we use
locale as the id.

This means we're sorting by locale instead of by the language name.  We should
sort by either translated language names translated in their own language (like
we show to the user in the list) or by the language names translated in the
system locale (like we show in the tooltips)

I take that back.  We wrongly set the sort column to the locale column, but then
override it with a custom sort function that sorts by the name column anyway.

(In reply to comment #5)
> Just sort the list by hand, only then can you get the order you want and never
> be surprised.

Of course this is nothing gdm specific. I remembered I always see the same thing
in Thunderbird when I sort my spam folder by subject, the Thai spam always
appears first.

I would just like to understand why Thai sorts before ASCII?

requested by Jens Petersen (#27995)

(In reply to comment #6)
> Why doesn't Unicode define such an ordering for different scripts?
> It seems defining such an order would be useful.

Think about it.  How should any two people agree on this?  Everybody will want their language to be first because it's the most important.  There will never be a generally acceptable solution based on collation.

If you want something else you have to implement it differently.

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I am happy with the current gdm order :)