[baseimage] set default locale en_US.UTF-8

[richard28530]

Signed-off-by: chenhu chenhu@didichuxing.com

- What I did
set default locale en_US.UTF-8
to avoid client (SSH) inject locale while login to switch

- How I did it

- How to verify it
login from a machine with non en_US.UTF-8
verify 'env' command output to check 'LANG' environment variable
use 'TAB' to do the auto-completion

- Description for the changelog

[qiluo-msft]

We are conservative on disk space, so we originally remove the locale files. I found another solution to solve the issue #1681 without any new packages.

You just need to create a new configuration file like:

sudo vi /etc/profile.d/locale.sh
export LANG=C
export LANGUAGE=C

logout and login. You will have no LANG injection from ssh client.
However, I notice the Debian Stretch bash prompt's color is lost. I don't find the clue right now...

[lguohan]

how large is the locale file?

[richard28530]

/usr/share/locale$ du -d 0 -h
50M .

[lguohan]

damn, it is pretty large, we are still dealing with devices with 2G disk which is quite challenging. any idea how can we get it shrink if we only care about en_US.UTF-8?

[sergeypopovich-ord]

How about localepurge Debian package? It's purpose to remove all unused locale message files and other stuff. While it is a hack it might be very useful to conserve space:

# localepurge
localepurge: Disk space freed in /usr/share/locale: 86292 KiB
localepurge: Disk space freed in /usr/share/man: 7088 KiB

Total disk space freed by localepurge: 93380 KiB

On test system after installation and manual run.

Also I think it is a good idea to run update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8 after we locale-gen en_US.UTF-8 to update /etc/default/locale.

[richard28530]

/usr/share/locale
/usr/share/man
already cleaned in the previous version of build_debian.sh

/usr/share/i18n/locales/
is cleaned after install & update locales, about 9M
other files in locales.deb is very small, less than 1M

[lguohan]

maybe it is better to use update-locale after locale-gen here?

https://www.thomas-krenn.com/en/wiki/Configure_Locales_in_Ubuntu

[lguohan]

looks like the disk is not an issue, what about the update-locale suggested by sergey?

[richard28530]

Adjusting Locales
The default settings are stored in the /etc/default/locale file.

$ cat /etc/default/locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
This file can either be adjusted manually or updated using the tool, update-locale.

update-locale LANG=de_DE.UTF-8

already manually modified the file, no need to update again

[lguohan]

I understand both way can achieve it, but isn't it better to use the tool to update the file so that you do not need to worry about the exact format of the file?

[richard28530]

add update-locale after manually modify it

I tried this below, doesn't work

#Adds a locale to a debian system in non-interactive mode
sudo sed -i '/^#.* en_US.* /s/^#//' $FILESYSTEM_ROOT/etc/locale.gen && \
    sudo LANG=C DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive chroot $FILESYSTEM_ROOT locale-gen "en_US.UTF-8"
sudo LANG=en_US.UTF-8 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive chroot $FILESYSTEM_ROOT update-locale "en_US.UTF-8"
sudo LANG=C chroot $FILESYSTEM_ROOT bash -c "find /usr/share/i18n/locales/ ! -name 'en_US' -type f -exec rm -f {} +"

[lguohan]

what is the error message?

[lguohan]

update-locale "LANG=en_US.UTF-8" is the correct command.