Comment 5 for bug 1448563

> Gnome-terminal is unfortunately known to have troubles with non-UTF-8
> locales, see e.g. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=732127.

> In your case, however, I suspect that you're doing something wrong with
> your installation (because you also seem to aim for UTF-8). It's weird
> to me that you use nonstandard tools to install them, rather than
> localedef or locale-gen.

> At the very least, what does "locale charmap" print with your locale? It
> should be "UTF-8".

Hi Egmont, and thanks for your attention to the bug. I certainly may have done something wrong; the online documentation about setting up a custom locale that I was able to find is confusing and sparse, and there seem to be very few tools to help an ordinary user customize a locale. I'm no locale expert; my motivation was just to use 24-hour time, YYYY-MM-DD dates, and the Metric system, even though I live in the US.

I originally tried using localedef directly, but it exited with code 1, listing a slew of errors that didn't seem to have anything to do with the modest customizations that I made to the locale. Rather than spend all day at it I tried the Python script that I mentioned in the bug description, which calls localedef. The script reported success, and my simple locale-test program verified that I had installed the locale well enough to get the date and time formats I wanted. Unfortunately, once my custom locale was installed, every time I launched a GUI program from the command line I got a fontconfig() warning complaining about the locale.

So I may have done something wrong, but I did succeed at getting the date and time formats I wanted. I filed the bug because I was able to launch a terminal under Ubuntu 14.10, but once I upgraded to Ubuntu 15.04, then I couldn't.

$ LANG="rob_custom.UTF-8"
$ locale
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
LANG=rob_custom.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_US
LC_CTYPE="rob_custom.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="rob_custom.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="rob_custom.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="rob_custom.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="rob_custom.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="rob_custom.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="rob_custom.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="rob_custom.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="rob_custom.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="rob_custom.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="rob_custom.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="rob_custom.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=
$ locale charmap
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
ANSI_X3.4-1968
$

Aha, the charmap isn't UTF-8 for some reason.

> You could also try setting LANG=<yourlocale> and LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
> simultaneously - does this work?

No, that doesn't seem to work. The "locale" command shows LC_CTYPE as "rob_custom.UTF-8" afterwards.

- Rob