Locale problem in Lenny Pup

There is a forum thread discussing the Debian build from Woof alpha3. I posted that locale setting is broken and it falls back to C locale.

If you open a terminal and run 'locale', it gives this error message:

locale: cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: no such file or directory

I did a google on that error message and got 15,000 hits.

This forum posted a solution:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-general-1/locale-cannot-set-lcall-to-default-locale-no-such-file-or-directory.-218622/

...to just export an empty thread:
# export LC_ALL=""

You could do that in /etc/profile. I can't try it right now, running Intrepid Puppy. Yeah, but it doesn't explain why I don't get that error message in Intrepid Puppy (Ubuntu).

This bug report to Debian is very interesting:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=369388

...indicating that the LC_ALL error message is misleading.

Ah, perhaps I know what the problem is... in Woof, file DISTRO_PKGS_SPECS-debian has this in it:

yes|glibc|libc6_,libc6-dev_,tzdata_|exe,dev,doc,nls
yes|glibc_locales|locales_,belocs-locales-bin_|exe,dev,doc,nls>exe

The thing is, that "belocs" package is actually an alternative locales system to that provided by glibc. The libc6 package has the executables 'locale' and 'localdef' and the locale package (which is separated from the glibc package by the Debian developers) has the raw data files that localedef reads to generate the locale data files for a particular country/region.
Belocs is an alternative system which is derived from the glibc locale system, but by putting belocs-locales-bin in there I have mixed two possible incompatible systems.

Furthermore, looking at the contents of libc6 and locales packages, they seem to have everything needed, belocs-locales-bin is not supplying anything extra.

...so, just delete 'belocs-locales-bin' and rebuild Lenny Pup. I'll do that soon.

---

Comments

Lenny's Kernel
Username: ttuuxxx
Hi Barry people have been talking about lenny's kernel and that the newer one on Upup is better, I was wondering if you were going to upgrade the kernel to maybe 2.6.29 which has the new ext4 file system, Debian does have it in the unstable section located http://packages.debian.org/sid/linux-image-2.6.29-1-486 The next issue we would have is that we wouldn't have any software which could format in ext4, There are cd's like Parted Magic which support ext4. But thats a bit over the top, When I tried compiling Gparted a few months back, It was heavily using Gnome libs, not like the past versions, The only thing I could see is hacking the older sources to use ext4, but I wouldn't have an idea how to do that. Anyways just an idea :) thanks for your time ttuuxxx

2.6.29
Username: BarryK
"Yeah, I'm waiting for 2.6.29.1 to be released, then I'll go for it. Probably Woof alpha4 will have it. I'm very happy with 2.6.29-rc7, runs on all my PCs. So this one may be the only kernel version we need, just have two flavours maybe, a uniprocessor conservative and a SMP flavour. Ok, I'll make sure the ext4 driver is enabled.

Tags: woof