Comment 9 for bug 140896

Revision history for this message
Walter (wdoekes) wrote :

@Josep: that bug report is unrelated. (Although it touches the same cron_default_mail_charset code.)

This issue is that:

(A) The cron daemon starts with no LANG (LANG=C)
(B) The processes start with the lang environment from /etc/default/locale (LANG=en_US.UTF-8)

Now the processes will print stuff like:

    $ rm abc
    rm: cannot remove ‘abc’ <-- note the non-ascii characters, because it has LANG=...UTF-8

But the mail with that error, will use:

    Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ANSI_X3.4-1968

instead of:

    Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

That causes mail clients to get UTF-8 while it is told that it gets ASCII, resulting in a crappy reading experience.

A working fix for me is to add the LANG variable to /etc/init/cron.conf so the cron process gets

    # echo 'env LANG=en_US.UTF-8' > /etc/init/cron.override
    # stop cron; start cron

(Or alternately, the CONTENT_TYPE= setting in crontab as suggested in https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=410057 )

I believe this bug got introduced by using upstart instead of the init script:
- the processes get the environment from /etc/pam.d/cron (LANG=en_US.UTF-8)
- cron gets the environment from /etc/default/locale BUT ONLY if it was started from /etc/init.d/cron. the upstart script does not load /etc/environment nor /etc/default/locale.

.. so .. that should probably mean that this is a ubuntu/cron bug, not an ubuntu/+source/cron bug.

And it first starts showing in Trusty because the tools use fancier tokens when unicode is available:

    ubuntu precise:
    # locale | grep ^LANG=; rm /tmp/abc
    LANG=en_US.UTF-8
    rm: cannot remove `/tmp/abc': No such file or directory

    ubuntu trusty
    # locale | grep ^LANG=; rm /tmp/abc
    LANG=en_US.UTF-8
    rm: cannot remove ‘/tmp/abc’: No such file or directory <-- see the fancy quotes here

Cheers,
Walter Doekes
OSSO B.V.

# lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
Release: 14.04
Codename: trusty
# dpkg -l cron | grep ^ii
ii cron 3.0pl1-124ubuntu2