Comment 9 for bug 920749

(In reply to comment #4)
> To me this is not OpenSSH bug. The reporters has to resolve vendor
> issue first, i.e. pam module or login script to preserve environment
> variables related to locale settings.

Concerning the pam module under Debian, this can be seen as a configuration bug, that can easily be fixed (under Debian 4.0, a.k.a. etch). First, if /etc/environment contains locale-related settings, they should be moved to /etc/default/locale as documented. Then the line

auth required pam_env.so envfile=/etc/default/locale

should be commented out since locale-related environment variables should be passed via SendEnv (I don't think that providing defaults other than POSIX or C is correct anyway, since there's no guarantee that specific locales will be compatible with the user's settings on the client side, and bad settings can trash the terminal).

Now, I'm not convinced that this is not *also* an OpenSSH bug. Said otherwise, what should come first? PAM or SendEnv settings? The current behavior is that SendEnv settings come first, then PAM can override these settings (via sshd-specific configuration, e.g. /etc/pam.d/sshd). If I understand correctly, according to Jean-Christophe Dubacq, PAM settings should come first (then they can be overridden by SendEnv). But I don't see any real reason for that, except that the user has more control with SendEnv, thus these settings should be applied later.