SSH locale

mdgm wrote:
Can you try 4.2.20 beta?: http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=51&t=57193

This has fixed a small issue, that I suspect was (partially) my own fault, in that the few locales provided are back:

% locale -a
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_COLLATE to default locale: No such file or directory
C
POSIX
de_DE.utf8
en_US.utf8
ja_JP.utf8
ko_KR.utf8
nl_NL.utf8
zh_CN.utf8
zh_TW.utf8

But /usr/bin/localedef is still not present (despite dpkg -L libc6 still saying it should be there).
Incidentally, I think this is what originally removed most of the above locales for me (locale-gen was able to remove, but not regenerate them due to lack of localedef).

If I change my local env variables, before I ssh into my ReadyNAS to something like this:

LANG=en_US.utf8
LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8

then the locale errors (or warnings?) go away.

I guess to some extent, the workaround for users is to
a) use one of the 7 supported locales (changing env variables before you log in if necessary)
b) never run locale-gen (because it deletes the old locales in /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive before checking if it can recreate them!)

And it seems to me a bug that
a) there are only 7 supported locales (at the very least, the common english ones could be aliased?)
b) /usr/bin/locale-gen is provided (from the locales dpkg) without its dependency, /usr/bin/localedef (from the libc6 dpkg)

Furthermore, a *lot* of the files listed in dpkg -L libc6 and dpkg -L locales are missing (86 and 544 files respectively).
I won't list them all here, but you can easily get a list by running:

ls `dpkg -L libc6` > /dev/null
ls `dpkg -L locales` > /dev/null

(any missing files will cause ls to print an error to stderr on screen, while the actual files just get printed to /dev/null)

In fact the same applies for a lot of the base system packages, no doubt to save on space... but with a 4GB root partition with only 17% usage (at least on my Ultra 4) this seems highly unnecessary.