Default locale unset on GCE

[davidmytton]

The default locale is not set on Debian builds on Google Compute Engine, tested in backports-debian-7-wheezy-v20140318. This causes warnings with apt e.g.

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
    LANGUAGE = (unset),
    LC_ALL = (unset),
    LANG = "en_GB.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

And causes some applications, like MongoDB, to fail to start. The workaround is to set export LC_ALL=C in the MongoDB init script and/or to set the default locale system wide:

sudo locale-gen en_US.UTF-8
sudo locale-gen en_IE.UTF-8
sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

However, this should be set by default.

[andsens]

Huh, that's puzzling. I can see Tomasz has included the locale taskset here. The default locale is set using update-locale here.

That should be enough. But apparently it isn't, I'll look into it.

[odyssey4me]

Yeah, when using the kvm provider I'm seeing a similar issue:

    LANGUAGE = (unset)
    LC_ALL = (unset)

This is with the following set in the manifest:

        "system": {
                "release":        "wheezy",
                "architecture":   "amd64",
                "bootloader":     "grub",
                "timezone":       "Africa/Johannesburg",
                "locale":         "en_ZA",
                "charmap":        "UTF-8",
                "virtio_modules": [ "virtio_pci", "virtio_blk", "virtio_balloon" ]
        }

In my case it appears that cloud-init is overwriting the default locale. A simple workaround for me is to:

sed -i 's/^# en_US.UTF8 UTF8$'/en_US.UTF8 UTF8/' /etc/locale.gen
locale-gen

[jkaplowitz]

@andsens The published images on GCE haven't been switched from build-debian-cloud to bootstrap-vz as of yet. Once the gce branch gets merged into bootstrap-vz master, we'd love to start working with Debian on switching the processes etc. Though, from what @odyssey4me said, it seems to be more general than just the gce provider.

[andsens]

Ah, I see. This is actually a mix of two different bugs. One in the legacy build-debian-cloud bootstrapper (the one @dmytton is experiencing) and one in the cloud-init plugin for bootstrap-vz (which is what @odyssey4me is reporting).

Regarding the build-debian-cloud bug: I am sorry to say that I simply do not have the time provide legacy support to that project. However the gce branch will soon be merged, which means this won't be a problem for long.

Regarding bootstrap-vz bug: I have created #58 to track this bug, so that we can discuss it over there @odyssey4me. I wrote down what I think is the problem, so please correct me if I am mistaken.

Closing this issue, since it was really only affecting build-debian-cloud in the described form.