Unable to install zh_CN locale

[craiga]

In .locale, I have the zh_CN for Chinese support, but language-pack-zh-base isn't a package. Does there need to be special handling for Chinese locales?

=== Updating or installing language-pack-zh-base
Hit:1 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial InRelease
Hit:2 http://apt.postgresql.org/pub/repos/apt xenial-pgdg InRelease
Hit:3 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-security InRelease
Hit:4 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates InRelease
Reading package lists...
Reading package lists...
Building dependency tree...
Package language-pack-zh-base is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
However the following packages replace it:
  language-pack-zh-hant-base language-pack-zh-hans-base
E: Package 'language-pack-zh-base' has no installation candidate
 !     Push rejected, failed to compile Locale app.
 !     Push failed

[dmathieu]

Could you try putting the following in .locales:

zh-ant_CN

[craiga]

Cool, the following both worked:

zh-hans_CN
zh-hant_CN

These aren't "proper" locale codes though, are they?

I'd be willing to try and contribute a patch to fix this, but I'm no expert in how Chinese locales should be handled.

[dmathieu]

I think this is fine. You can set a proper LOCALE environment variable to use the right one.

[craiga]

Hmm, I'm not sure if this is working. I can't set a Chinese locale in bash or Python.

$ heroku run bash --app unixtimesta-mp
Running bash on ⬢ unixtimesta-mp... up, run.8744 (Hobby)
[error] cannot open locale definition file `zh-hans_CN': No such file or directory
[error] cannot open locale definition file `zh-hant_CN': No such file or directory
~ $ export LC_ALL=fr_CA
~ $ date
mercredi 17 octobre 2018, 08:57:51 (UTC+0000)
~ $ export LC_ALL=zh
bash: warning: setlocale: LC_ALL: cannot change locale (zh)
~ $ export LC_ALL=zh_hans
bash: warning: setlocale: LC_ALL: cannot change locale (zh_hans): No such file or directory
~ $ export LC_ALL=zh-hans
bash: warning: setlocale: LC_ALL: cannot change locale (zh-hans): No such file or directory
~ $ export LC_ALL=zh-hans_CN
bash: warning: setlocale: LC_ALL: cannot change locale (zh-hans_CN): No such file or directory
~ $ python
Python 3.7.0 (default, Aug  1 2018, 21:18:01) 
[GCC 5.4.0 20160609] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import locale
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, ('fr_CA', 'UTF-8'))
'fr_CA.UTF-8'
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, ('zh_CN', 'UTF-8'))
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/app/.heroku/python/lib/python3.7/locale.py", line 604, in setlocale
    return _setlocale(category, locale)
locale.Error: unsupported locale setting