Aha, I've got it. It turns out that debconf looks at LANGUAGE in the environment as well as running setlocale(), so if we simply set LANGUAGE correctly there's no need to run locale-gen at all! We get a few perl warnings (which I could suppress with PERL_BADLANG=1 if I felt so inclined), but that's all.
Aha, I've got it. It turns out that debconf looks at LANGUAGE in the environment as well as running setlocale(), so if we simply set LANGUAGE correctly there's no need to run locale-gen at all! We get a few perl warnings (which I could suppress with PERL_BADLANG=1 if I felt so inclined), but that's all.