Being able to setup these things is pretty hard for the average user so seeing something like this is great. I’m glad you also included fallback languages since in many cases English is a bad fallback.

However, I think you might find that these things blow up into people wanting more options. In South Africa (ZA) we have a defacto currency representation of R1 000,00 but we’ve also being Americanised and use R1,000.00 – either is great except if you are a journalist or accountant and you need the nbsp version. We’d need decimal and thousand separator to handle that.

I don’t remember if GNOME makes the decision based on where you live or what language you pick, but either way, any use case outside “I am an American, therefore I live in the US and speak American English” or “I live in Sweden, therefore I only speak Swedish” is nigh impossible without lots and lots of magic. You can move to another country, you can’t speak another language, you can’t do anything that doesn’t fit a very narrow set of assumptions.

It’s plain retarded and there are tons of bugs, posts, and mailing list complaints about this. Not that anyone seems to understand the problem, maybe they all fit the assumptions? The weird thing is that it’s only a matter of asking about *both* language and where you live (or rather, what countrys way of doing things you prefer) instead of assuming that one of them automatically means the other (whichever way that was).

The point is that there are easily misunderstood consequences of simply whacking LANG=xx_YY in order to try and achieve one goal of say, UI in language xx, so maybe something like the above could head off some pain and bring LANGUAGE into play to support efforts to get “just the UI in English, but nothing else please”