default locales

[Ryan Steele]

As a preface, I'm using 3.2.14 on Ubuntu Server. 

I've got FAI install clients that install packages (for example, 
postgresql-8.3) that are dependent on the default locale being set to 
(in my case) en_US.UTF-8.  So, naturally I made sure that my 
/srv/fai/config/debconf/CLASSNAME had the following:

locales locales/default_environment_locale select en_US.UTF-8
locales locales/locales_to_be_generated multiselect en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8

But I noticed that the clients didn't think that was the default locale; 
SQL_ASCII encoding is a direct result of the default locale not being 
set and falling back to 'C'.  The evidence is pretty clear:

root at host[~]# chroot /target
host[~]# su - postgres -c "psql -l"
          List of databases
     Name     |   Owner   | Encoding 
--------------+-----------+-----------
 postgres     | postgres  | SQL_ASCII
 template0    | postgres  | SQL_ASCII
 template1    | postgres  | SQL_ASCII


After some further investigation after ctrl+c'ing to hold off on the 
reboot, I noticed that if I didn't include the 'language-pack-en' 
package in my client's package list, a 'locale -a' shows only:

C
POSIX

and the system would spew messages like:

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
        LANGUAGE = (unset),
        LC_ALL = (unset),
        LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"
    are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory

locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory

locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory



But, FAI (task_debconf, in particular) really seemed to want to convince 
me that everything was okay.  There was nothing in the error.log, and 
only this in the other logs:

# From fai.log
Calling task_debconf
Adding debconf data from /var/lib/fai/config/debconf/CLASSNAME
Reconfiguring package locales

# From debconf.log
info: Trying to set 'locales/default_environment_locale' [select] to 
'en_US.UTF-8'
info: Loading answer for 'locales/default_environment_locale'
info: Trying to set 'locales/locales_to_be_generated' [multiselect] to 
'en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8'
info: Loading answer for 'locales/locales_to_be_generated'


However, the results don't lie - the postgres-8.3 package thinks that 
the locale is C (or at least was at the time postgres was installed).  
So what gives?  Well, I think (not 100% sure, but definitely pretty 
suspicious) the reason is that minimal Ubuntu Server installs don't do 
any localization, and only natively have the C and POSIX locales, which 
is maybe only a nuisance in some cases, but obviously a big problem for 
packages like postgresql.  So, I suppose my only recourse here is to 
configure the locales in a hook before the package installation.  The 
instsoft.CLASSNAME hook seems like it would be a good candidate, though 
I haven't tested it yet (but will report back once I have).

But even if it does, I really think that FAI should check to make sure 
the client really has the debconf information we're told we can set in 
the $FAI_CONFIGDIR/debconf/ directory.  Based on the log entries (or 
lack thereof), I initially assumed nothing went wrong when setting up 
the client's locales, which is not the case, and wasted time looking 
elsewhere for problems.