Since 2017-03-31 Locales package has been removed

[Morgan Goose]

This package has been removed from the base xenial distributed tars. It's breaking some downstream integrations of ours that expected it to be present. Was this intentional?

[Dan Watkins (oddbloke)]

Hi Morgan,

Could you clarify which downloads you are seeing this problem in?

Thanks,

Dan

[Morgan Goose (morgan-goose)]

the last one to have it is:
https://partner-images.canonical.com/core/xenial/20170328/ubuntu-xenial-core-cloudimg-amd64.manifest

these do not:
https://partner-images.canonical.com/core/xenial/20170331/ubuntu-xenial-core-cloudimg-amd64.manifest
https://partner-images.canonical.com/core/xenial/20170410/ubuntu-xenial-core-cloudimg-amd64.manifest

On Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 06:35 Dan Watkins <email address hidden>
wrote:

> Hi Morgan,
>
> Could you clarify which downloads you are seeing this problem in?
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Dan
>
> ** Changed in: cloud-images
> Status: New => Incomplete
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are subscribed to the bug
> report.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1682305
>
> Title:
> Since 2017-03-31 Locales package has been removed
>
> Status in cloud-images:
> Incomplete
>
> Bug description:
> This package has been removed from the base xenial distributed tars.
> It's breaking some downstream integrations of ours that expected it to
> be present. Was this intentional?
>
> To manage notifications about this bug go to:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/cloud-images/+bug/1682305/+subscriptions
>

[Mitar (mitar)]

This has also been reported for Docker images: https://github.com/docker-library/official-images/issues/2856

[Morgan Goose (morgan-goose)]

Any thoughts on this issue, and an ETA on it's resolution? Seems pretty straight forward to add it back in?

[Dan Watkins (oddbloke)]

Right, this looks like the consequence of an internal rename; the "ubuntu-core" project in livecd-rootfs was renamed to "ubuntu-base" and we didn't keep up.

We're code-reviewing (what I believe to be) the fix internally, and I'll generate a new tarball once that's done.

[Dan Watkins (oddbloke)]

Hello all,

My initial investigation of this issue turns out to have been mistaken; I was misreading the build logs and thought this was an issue that we've previously fixed in other releases.

The images available at https://partner-images.canonical.com/core/xenial/ are intended for use within Docker and other places where an extremely small image footprint is desirable. For a majority of use cases, locales and timezone data take up extra space without being used. We _have_ intentionally removed these from minimal images, as it reduces the size of the Docker image by ~8%. This represents a substantial space saving, and a corresponding increase in container density.

If you need locales and/or tzdata for your application, you'll want to modify your scripting to install them specifically. If you don't actually need or want a super-minimal image, then you would probably be better served by consuming the images available from http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com.

Thanks,

Dan

[Morgan Goose (morgan-goose)]

Where is this PR, since as it stands this is an undocumented breaking change. I'd rather a working image than a smaller one, especially since I see you've saved only 4MB here.

[Jordan (pielj)]

That's disappointing, this breaks our CI pipeline and I imagine it does for others as well. I understand the need need/want for a minimal image, but removing packages from an image after coming to expect them there is really throwing a wrench in our gears.

Was this change discussed anywhere? At this point in time I have to consider these minimum images unreliable if at any point in time a package can be dropped for the sake of "saving space".

[Martin Smith (martinb3)]

+1 this seems like an undocumented, breaking change that snuck in to a release that shouldn't have any breaking changes.

[Rasmus Larsen (rla-2)]

I am all for this change in general, minimal images are great and there are many cases where locales aren't needed... However, I don't believe it's reasonable to introduce this in the middle of a release cycle.

Essentially you're causing thousands of hours of debugging for users of your images, at a time where we just don't expect breakages and therefore aren't looking for upstream caused breakages. I would suggest saving these breaking changes for new releases or alternatively releasing these minimisation improvements into a special "unstable/minimal" package.

If you continually make these kinds of changes, you'll severely reduce the value of the images.

[Morgan Goose (morgan-goose)]

@daniel-thewatkins can you elaborate on the above concerns? It does seem that a breaking change should not have been introduced into the images at this time.

[Ian Hinder (ian-hinder)]

This issue just wasted about half an hour of my time, as it broke a docker build. I don't understand why a package would be removed from this version of Ubuntu after it has been released. It is particularly inappropriate because this is an LTS version! Imagine if a desktop user suddenly found their OS didn't work any more after installing updates. That surely wouldn't be allowed. Why is it being allowed here? I agree with the above commenters; this is a regression, and should have waited for the next release.

[Tao Wang (twang2218)]

This is a breaking change, it's definitely a bug, which broken many docker images depends on ubuntu image.

It's definitely NOT a feature of small footprint! A feature shouldn't break other packages/images depends on it. Please add `locale` and `tzdata` back.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/cloud-images/+bug/1682622

[Morgan Goose (morgan-goose)]

Can this be reopened? It's a bug, and needs to be addressed

[Scott Enderle (scott-enderle)]

I agree this is a bug. This broke basic file management in Python 2. Without a UTF-8 locale, by default Python 2 tries to convert filenames to ascii and chokes on unicode characters. No degree of minimalism justifies breaking unicode support in a modern operating system.