Problem enabling new language on gdm language selection list

[Matthias Clasen]

On Tue, 2008-08-12 at 19:17 +0530, Rahul Bhalerao wrote:
> For adding a language on gdm's login screen, apart from having a
> locale file, few translations and required fonts, it is required that
> language is recognized by fontconfig.
> To make a fontconfig recognize the language, a related lang.orth file
> is required. With my experiment on this, I think there is also need to
> add an entry to fcfreetype.c of fontconfig and related language code
> entry in ttnameid.h of freetype2. After making all these changes the
> language is listed in the gdm's list.  But this has a problem, as the
> entries of language code in ttnameid.h are MS and MAC codes for these
> languages and there are languages that do not have these codes but are
> included in iso639-2 language codes.
> Thus my question is, how much important is it to have an entry for the
> language in the file fcfreetype.c of fontconfig and related entry in
> the header file ttnameid.h of freetype2? And what is to be done for
> the language that does not have MS or MAC code? Is it possible to use
> our own codes?
> 
> Can anyone please help resolving this?

Ray (who wrote most of this code) is busy doing something else right
now, so let me summarize what I know about this:

What gdm does it is only shows a language in the list if a) we have
translations for it and b) we have fonts for it. For b), we basically
ask fontconfig "do you have fonts for this language ?". It seems that 
fontconfig says "no" if it doesn't know the language. It would be better
if fontconfig could say "I don't know" in that case...