Comment 15 for bug 920749

'little standardisation'? locales ought to be la_CO[@variant].charset ; with la and CO being ISO639 and ISO3166. The availability of a locale on a given system is not guaranteed; however, ti is very usual to install in some country the locale for this country's main language in both charsets (old 8-bit and UTF-8, really).

pam_environment is perceived more as a default setting than a mandatory one. And the fact that AcceptEnv is set by admin _and_ that the list of accepted variables is a closed list should be enough to convince you that AcceptEnv variables will not override _mandatory_ variables that should be set by the admin only, never to be overriden: the admin would simply remove these variables from the AcceptEnv list. List that, by the way, on all linux systems I know (several distributions), contains by default only... LANG and LC_* (when enabled).

Getting around this bug by using another variable is really not a good way. Many shells have different initialization paths (even for the same shell: login and not login shells). pam_environment is the way to set sane defaults; sshd should override the user-specified variables.

Maybe there should be an option to set, so that the admin can choose whether pam should come first or not. I can code that.