[DRE-maint] Bug#725496: Bug#725496: Processed: severity of 725496 is grave

[Antonio Terceiro]

Control: reassign -1 ruby-gettext

On Mon, Oct 07, 2013 at 12:11:46AM +0200, Francesco Poli wrote:
> I don't want to ignore that!
> I was under the impression that the issue only affected a few users
> with an unusual (and manually set) configuration ("*.utf8") that could
> be easily changed to an equivalent working one ("*.UTF-8").
>
> If the "*.utf8" locale variables are set by gdm3, we seem to have a big
> problem!
> 
> I've just performed some further testing and it seems that the issue is
> triggered by the switch from Ruby 1.8 to Ruby 1.9:
> 
> # apt-listbugs -v
> 0.1.10
> # LC_ALL=de_DE.utf8 ruby1.8 /usr/sbin/apt-listbugs -h
> Aufruf: apt-listbugs [Optionen] <Befehl> [Argumente]
> Optionen:
> [...]
> # LC_ALL=de_DE.utf8 ruby1.9.1 /usr/sbin/apt-listbugs -h
> File: /usr/share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/apt-listbugs.mo: unknown
> encoding name - utf8 (ArgumentError)
> 
> 
> If this is all confirmed, please feel free to raise the severity of
> this bug report again and to file a new bug report against
> apt-listbugs/0.1.10.
> This new bug report could be titled something like "should not migrate
> into testing until the .utf8 issue is solved", and should be of RC
> severity and be blocked by 725496.
> 
> I apologize, if I gave the impression that I wanted to neglect severe
> issues!

The other day I was debugging this, I even asked on #debian-gnome about
it. I thought it was a local problem with my system, didn't imagine it
was a general problem.

So the issue is: for some reason, gdm3 will set $LANG set to xx_YY.utf8
to old user accounts, what triggers this bug, while new users will have
$LANG set to xx_YY.UTF-8 which is handled correctly by ruby-gettext.

The underlying problem is how ruby-gettext maps the current locale into
a valid Ruby encoding name ("UTF-8" and 'utf-8' are valid Ruby encoding
names, 'utf8' without the dash is not).

You can workaround this by clearing the "Language=" setting in
/var/lib/AccountsService/users/$USER - in the next login, you will get
LANG=xx_YY.UTF-8 in your environment (even though `locale -a` will still
list it as xx_YY.utf8). I did this on my system, but telling every user
out there to do this is not reallistic.

Anyway, I reported this issue a couple of weeks ago and upstream fixed
it quickly after that:
https://github.com/ruby-gettext/gettext/pull/20

> BTW, do you have any idea of how the issue could be fixed?

A new upstream release of ruby-gettext should fix this. I'm on it.

-- 
Antonio Terceiro <terceiro at debian.org>
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