Comment 5 for bug 1916935

Revision history for this message
Christian Ehrhardt  (paelzer) wrote : Re: Major changes in sorting method of glibc on Ubuntu 18.04 after upgrading to Ubuntu 18.04.5

Hi,
to simplify the following text let us call order that lists 1-1 first "1-1" and the one that lists 11 first "11".

I checked the following:
bionic container (up to date) => 11
focal container (up to date) => 1-1
hirsute container (up to date) => 1-1
bionic vm (up to date) => 11
bionic vm (downgraded all) => 11
bionic vm (downgraded all + re-login) => 1-1

So it seems to be related to something that is applied while logging in (maybe some more ENV/Locale magic?).

bionic vm (glibc upgraded again) => 1-1
bionic vm (glibc upgraded again + re-login) => 1-1

So it was not glibc (that included libc-bin libc6 locales multiarch-support).
So it was none of these ... ?!?
Let me check if I can

bionic vm (all-upgraded) => 1-1
bionic vm (all-upgraded + re-login) => 11

Ok so I know the following for now:
1. some upgrade breaks/changes this
2. it is not glibc
3. it needs a re-login to have effect

I did the following experiment.
All downgraded, one session kept up, one session re-logged.
That gave me both behaviors with the same software.

Comparing the ENV and EXPORT of those two I've found:

$ diff 11.env 1-1.env | grep LC
< LC_MEASUREMENT=C.UTF-8
> LC_MEASUREMENT=de_DE.UTF-8
< LC_PAPER=C.UTF-8
< LC_MONETARY=C.UTF-8
> LC_PAPER=de_DE.UTF-8
> LC_MONETARY=de_DE.UTF-8
< LC_NAME=C.UTF-8
> LC_NAME=de_DE.UTF-8
< LC_ADDRESS=C.UTF-8
< LC_NUMERIC=C.UTF-8
> LC_ADDRESS=de_DE.UTF-8
> LC_NUMERIC=de_DE.UTF-8
< LC_TELEPHONE=C.UTF-8
> LC_TELEPHONE=de_DE.UTF-8
< LC_IDENTIFICATION=C.UTF-8
> LC_IDENTIFICATION=de_DE.UTF-8
< LC_TIME=C.UTF-8
> LC_TIME=de_DE.UTF-8

Seeing that one of them carried my local LC info also indicates that the problem might only affect "some" systems depending on their local language settings.

In my case it came down to
LC_NUMERIC=de_DE.UTF-8
vs
LC_NUMERIC=C.UTF-8

That made it behave constantly the same.
No a question might be which upgrade changed that ... ?