Bug 74159 – Fluxbox hangs if it can't find a translation for the current locale

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE

[Description Mary Y 2004-12-11 20:52:35 UTC]

Fluxbox hangs on startup if it can't find a fluxbox translation (/usr/share/fluxbox/nls/*) for the current locale.

For instance, if I set LANG zh_TW (Traditional Chinese) fluxbox will hang. If I set it to a supported translation, (such as es_ES, de_DE, sv_SE etc), it works just fine. 

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Export the LANG variable, or even just LC_CTYPE, to a translation fluxbox doesn't have (like zh_TW, Trad. Chinese)
2. Start fluxbox


Actual Results:  
Fluxbox hangs

Expected Results:  
Fluxbox should have run normally, defaulting to the "C" locale like most
programs do when they can't find the requested translation.

This happens with both the 0.9.11 and 0.9.10 versions of fluxbox, and I remember
this happening several months ago as well, but I didn't know what was causing it
then. I've tried compiling fluxbox with and without nls support, too. Even
without nls (no translations in /usr/share/fluxbox/nls), previously supported
locales (see below) work just fine, whereas unsupported locales (see below)
still don't!

The locales that I've tested that it doesn't work with seem to be any
unsupported ones, but I've tried zh_TW, zh_TW.Big5, zh_TW.UTF-8, zh_CN,
zh_CN.GB2312, zh_CN.UTF-8 and en_GB.UTF-8. The ones that work, I picked randomly
from the ones that got installed in /usr/share/fluxbox/nls.. pt_PT, de_DE,
es_ES, sv_SE, pl_PL, they all work just fine.

I tried to trick fluxbox by making a directory in fluxbox/nls for zh_TW and
copying the translation file from fluxbox/nls/C to my zh_TW folder, but it
didn't work. I tried symlinking the above folders as well, still nothing.

My emerge info:
Gentoo Base System version 1.6.7
Portage 2.0.51-r8 (default-linux/x86/2004.2, gcc-3.4.3, glibc-2.3.4.20041102-r0,
2.6.9 i686)
=================================================================
System uname: 2.6.9 i686 Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz
Python:              dev-lang/python-2.3.4 [2.3.4 (#1, Oct 22 2004, 22:30:19)]
ccache version 2.3 [enabled]
dev-lang/python:     2.3.4
sys-devel/autoconf:  2.59-r6, 2.13
sys-devel/automake:  1.8.5-r2, 1.5, 1.4_p6, 1.6.3, 1.7.9, 1.9.3
sys-devel/binutils:  2.15.92.0.2-r1
sys-devel/libtool:   1.5.2-r7
virtual/os-headers:  2.4.22
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86 ~x86"
AUTOCLEAN="yes"
CFLAGS="-O2 -march=pentium4 -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe"
CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb /usr/kde/2/share/config
/usr/kde/3/share/config /usr/lib/mozilla/defaults/pref /usr/share/config
/var/qmail/control"
CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/gconf /etc/terminfo /etc/env.d"
CXXFLAGS="-O2 -march=pentium4 -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe"
DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles"
FEATURES="autoaddcvs autoconfig ccache distlocks sandbox sfperms"
GENTOO_MIRRORS="ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/Linux/distributions/gentoo/"
MAKEOPTS="-j2"
PKGDIR="/usr/portage/packages"
PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/tmp"
PORTDIR="/usr/portage"
PORTDIR_OVERLAY=""
SYNC="rsync://rsync.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage"
USE="X acpi alsa apm avi berkdb bindist bitmap-fonts cdr cjk crypt cups
divx4linux dvd dvdr encode esd exif f77 fam flac foomaticdb fortran gdbm gif
gnome gphoto2 gpm gstreamer gtk gtk2 imagemagick imlib immqt-bc jack java
joystick jpeg junit libg++ libwww mad mikmod mime motif mozilla mpeg mysql
ncurses nls oggvorbis opengl oss pam pdflib perl php png postgres python
quicktime readline samba scanner sdl slang speex spell sqlite ssl svg svga tcltk
tcpd tidy tiff truetype unicode usb x86 xine xml xml2 xmms xv zlib"

[Comment 1 Ciaran McCreesh 2004-12-12 08:50:56 UTC]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 65186 ***

[Comment 2 Mary Y 2004-12-12 12:19:16 UTC]

Why'd this get marked as a duplicate of #65186? I don't see anything about locale settings in that bug, unless I'm missing something really obvious. :-)

My fluxbox starts FINE with the default locale (I was just using it today) and any other supported locales such as Spanish, German, Polish, Swedish - just not if I set locale to a translation that fluxbox doesn't have, like Traditional Chinese. (I don't think hanging is typical behaviour for programs when they can't find the requested locale - all my Gnome programs will default to "C" if they can't find the one I want) 

I'm using xorg-x11-6.8.0-r3, BTW.

[Comment 3 Mathias Gumz 2004-12-14 06:46:36 UTC]

it has todo with locals because the locales define which fonts the xserver is able to give. fluxbox askes the xserver about a wanted font and if no exact match is given back fluxbox tries a fallback. this can result in long loading coz it tries to find a good fallback by offering "*" at last resort in the xmb-code of fluxbox. if you dont want this, dont use such locales or compile with ./configure --disable-xmb, i know that one of the new fb-ebuilds has such a use-flag, ciaranm added it.

we (upstream) are discussing the issue of fontloading already, no solution yet written.