Choosing India as location sets locale as en_IN and not en_IN.utf8

[Vish]

Binary package hint: ubiquity

Not sure why this is different, but when the location is chosen as India during install the locale is set as en_IN rather than en_IN.utf8
This causes problems with gwibber > Bug 653225 [and maybe other applications which do not factor this.]

~$ locale
LANG=en_IN
LC_CTYPE="en_IN"
LC_NUMERIC="en_IN"
LC_TIME="en_IN"
LC_COLLATE="en_IN"
LC_MONETARY="en_IN"
LC_MESSAGES="en_IN"
LC_PAPER="en_IN"
LC_NAME="en_IN"
LC_ADDRESS="en_IN"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_IN"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_IN"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_IN"
LC_ALL=

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.10
Package: ubiquity (not installed)
Uname: Linux 2.6.35-02063504-generic i686
Architecture: i386
Date: Sat Oct 2 02:09:51 2010
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" - Alpha i386 (20100924)
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_IN
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: ubiquity

[Arne Goetje (arnegoetje)]

A lot of software expects the encoding to be specified in the locale code. Thererfore the installer really should always append .utf8 when a language-country combination doesn't have it. GDM and language-selector do this correctly, btw.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

No, ubiquity is correct here - en_IN.UTF-8 wouldn't be a valid locale. Look at /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED which lists only en_IN.

Please open bugs on the applications that get this wrong. They must use nl_langinfo or a similar interface, and must not try to parse the locale name.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

(If we changed ubiquity, we would just hide the bugs in those applications, and users would run across them in different ways.)

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

For an example of an application that gets this right, see man-db. I put some effort into making sure it actually complied with locale specifications.

[Ken VanDine (ken-vandine)]

Moving this to python, since it seems to be broken in locale.setlocale

[Ken VanDine (ken-vandine)]

Easy reproducer:

LANG=en_IN python lp-653259.py

You'll get an exception, "unsupported locale setting"

[Matthias Klose (doko)]

python gets this information from locale.alias, in the libx11-data package.

[Matthias Klose (doko)]

$ grep en_IN /usr/share/X11/locale/locale.alias
en_IN en_IN.ISO8859-1
en_IN: en_IN.ISO8859-1

[dino99 (9d9)]

This version has expired