Snap package: language sets to english only

[Dadu042]

When launching the game, it does set its language to english while my OS is french.

• OS: Ubuntu 24.04.1
• Freeciv21 version: 3.0.4 (snap package: april 2024, stable). Same thing with v3.1 beta 2 (snap, sept 2024).

Perhaps the fix is to add to 'snapcraft.yaml' after 'plugs:' the line '- locale-control' (my ref: https://snapcraft.io/docs/locale-control-interface).

[lmoureaux]

Can reproduce.

[jwrober]

Thanks for the report @Dadu042. What happens if you install latest/edge or latest/beta? v3.1-beta.2 is there. I'm curious if this is a snap issue or something with our package.

[jwrober]

Oh, I see more of the original post. I should have read the whole thing. We can post an update with that setting. Thanks

[lmoureaux]

Recommendation for @Dadu042: Use Flatpak for now.

After trying things for hours, here are the results of my investigation:

• The locale data is present in the snap at /snap/freeciv21/current/usr/share/locale/
• The snap sets LOCPATH to $HOME/.local/share/locale:/usr/lib/locale
  • kcalc and gwenview get something different: /root/snap/gwenview/126/.local/share/locale:/usr/lib/locale
• setlocale() supposedly uses LOCPATH to set the locale search path, but I always get /usr/share/locale from it independently of LOCPATH
• We hard-code the location of our MO file to ${CMAKE_INSTALL_FULL_LOCALEDIR} in a call to bindtextdomain()
  • Un-hard-coding it does not help
  • Hard-coding it to /snap/freeciv21/current/usr/share/locale/ appears to work, but is ugly
• Ki18n has a much nicer API than bare gettext. In particular it supports a real search path instead of a single folder like bindtextdomain(). Should consider switching for 3.2, too late for 3.1

[jwrober]

How did you hard code to /snap/freeciv21/current/usr/share/locale/ in your testing? I would like to resolve this issue this week if possible, even with a hack for now.

Keep the issue open to handle the problem better w/ Ki18n post 3.1 release.

[lmoureaux]

Hacky hack, I changed the value directly in the call to bindtextdomain, compiled, then I went inside the container with snap run --shell freeciv21.freeciv21-client, navigated to my usual fc21 folder, and started the game from there.

[jwrober]

List of KDE's snaps - https://invent.kde.org/neon/snap-packaging

[jwrober]

There is either A) a snapcraft upstream issue around this or B) something in our code that just doesn't work in a snap environment. Removing this from 3.1-stable milestone. Will move to ki18n for 3.2 series.