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Revision as of 06:31, 8 January 2019 by Zbyszek (talk | contribs) (add link to bug)

Reset locale if not available

Summary

When logging in over ssh or another mechanism, locale settings are forwarded. If the destination does not support that locale, C.UTF-8 will be used instead.

Owner

Current status

  • Targeted release: Fedora 30
  • Last updated: 2019-01-08
  • Tracker bug:

Detailed Description

This is a continuation of Changes/Remove glibc-langpacks-all from buildroot. With that change implemented, it is much more likely for a system to only support C.UTF-8 or some other small set of locales. When logging in into such an image from a normal system that uses a "full" locale like en_US.UTF-8 or the equivalent for another language, those locale settings are forwarded, resulting in a session with invalid locale settings and errors from various tools.

The same problem could occur previously, for example when logging in from a desktop with LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8 to a container with only en_EN.UTF-8 installed.

To avoid this, the locale setting will be reset to C.UTF-8 if the current setting is "invalid" (not found).

We already have a mechanism to reset locale information if it is unusable. /etc/profile.d/lang.sh will unset Japanese/Korean/Chinese/... locales only the tty, because the kernel cannot display such fonts properly, so we switch to en_US.UTF-8 to get something displayed. The same mechanism will be used for this.

Benefit to Fedora

Avoid stupid warnings like 

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
	LC_CTYPE = "fr_FR.UTF-8",
	LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"
        ...
       are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to a fallback locale ("en_US.UTF-8").

Scope

  • Proposal owners:
    • Provide a patch to /etc/profile.d/lang.{sh,csh} to check if the inherited locale is present, and if not, reset to C.UTF-8.
  • Other developers: n/a
  • Policies and guidelines: no changes needed
  • Trademark approval: N/A (not needed for this Change)

Upgrade/compatibility impact

I think this should be beneficial in all cases. I doubt that anyone runs with broken locale settings on purpose.

How To Test

Login to a different machine with a locale not installed on that machine. Verify that the locale is set to C.UTF-8. If the locale is installed on the target machine, it should not be reset.

User Experience

Slightly easier ssh sessions . See also 1432426.

Dependencies

None.

Contingency Plan

Revert the change to /etc/profile.d/lang.*.

  • Contingency mechanism: revert the patch, rebuild setup package
  • Contingency deadline: any time before relase
  • Blocks release? no
  • Blocks product? no

Documentation

None needed.

Release Notes

Locale settings will be reset to C.UTF-8 when logging into a machine which does not have the locale that is used on the source machine.

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