Comment 6 for bug 859814

So a couple of findings here.

We are doing locales wrong: generating the locales is only part of the process of localizations. So while Cloud-Init generates the locales, the images are far from localized. In order to have a localized image, the base language pack (i.e. language-pack-{en,fr,de,...} needs to be installed otherwise the base language remains in English. The default "en_US.UTF8" locale is incomplete in the images since the language pack is not installed.

Therefore, I think that we should do the following:

1. The images should have the "language-pack-en" installed. Any English speaker who is exporting variable via SSH will automatically get localization as long as the localization is standard. Since Ubuntu's language of collaberation is English, this should fix the vast majority of users encountering localization problems, unless they are exporting non-standard chacter sets (i.e. exporting en_GB instead of en_GB.UTF8).

2. Cloud-init will should support the installation of language packs when it parses "locale: <locale>" during the cloud-config section.

3. Cloud-init should have a /etc/profile.d message that tells people if their locale settings are wrong and how to fix it.