setting locale to "C" doesn't choose a generic mirror

[Mario Limonciello]

Binary package hint: choose-mirror

Version: choose-mirror 2.29ubuntu2
Ubiquity 2.2.10

During install I've preseeded:

'd-i debian-installer/locale string C'

I'd expect that the selected mirror would be the generic "archive.ubuntu.com", but instead I'm directed at 'dz.archive.ubuntu.com'

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Jerone, can you explain why this is an OEM priority? I agree that it is a bug, but the workaround should be trivial:

  d-i mirror/http/mirror select archive.ubuntu.com

I'd rather spend time on bugs without a straightforward workaround.

[Mario Limonciello (superm1)]

If adding that in actually did the trick, I'd agree it doesn't need to be a priority item, but I've tried with that preseed as well as trying " d-i apt-setup/use_mirror boolean true" or "d-i apt-setup/use_mirror boolean false" and still dz.archive.ubuntu.com is getting selected.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Hmm. OK. Shouldn't be too hard to fix then ...

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Could I have full preseeding information for your system? Simply preseeding debian-installer/locale to C causes debian-installer/country to still be asked; that may be a bug in itself, but nevertheless the answer to that question would be quite relevant to this bug.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Unfortunately my Internet connection recently dropped to 192kbps due to a fault; that should be resolved soon, but in the meantime I'm having trouble reproducing this directly, so if you have a DEBCONF_DEBUG=developer log of this behaviour then that would very much speed up a fix. Thanks!

[Jerone Young (jerone)]

Business justification:
             Dell would like to standardize preseed file by using generics provided by installer to have the correct behavior. Dell will use work around suggested by Colin in comment #1 for 10.04.

@Colin
             Thanks for looking into this.

[Jerone Young (jerone)]

Also to add the expectation is to get this resolved in 10.10 . So remains a priority.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Given enough information (or time to reproduce this myself), I'd
actually still like to get this resolved for 10.04 if I can.

[Mario Limonciello (superm1)]

Hi Colin:

Currently debian-installer/country is not preseeded to anything. Preseeding it to "US" causes us.archive.ubuntu.com to be selected (which is closer to more preferable, but still as these machines won't be necessarily in the US, the more generic archive.ubuntu.com should be selected).

I'm attaching /var/log/installer/debug after a run of ubiquity with debug-ubiquity in /proc/cmdline. This debug run doesn't contain debian-installer/country set to anything right now.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Ah, silly me, I was testing using a netboot image rather than desktop,
which was why I was seeing the mandatory country question. Thanks for
the debug log.

What's happening here is that the country question is being asked, but
isn't preseeded, so it winds up defaulting to the first in alphabetical
order from the English choices, i.e. Africa -> Algeria, country code DZ.
choose-mirror then just follows on from that. We probably ought to
avoid that when the locale is C, but before doing that I need to audit
all our installer code, choose-mirror and other things, to make sure
that it will deal correctly with debian-installer/country being empty.

I'll need to do at least some of this investigation before I'm able to
say whether this will be feasible for 10.04 LTS. I hope it will be.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Actually, thinking about it, that's a daft way to go about it given the
time constraints. I'll just special-case the C locale in choose-mirror
at least for the moment; simple, quick, and unlikely to break anything
else.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package choose-mirror - 2.29ubuntu3

---------------
choose-mirror (2.29ubuntu3) lucid; urgency=low

  * Expand CC.archive.ubuntu.com to archive.ubuntu.com if
    debian-installer/locale is set to "C" (LP: #550694).
 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Tue, 13 Apr 2010 09:55:58 +0100