[Reproducible-builds] Weird localedef failures

[Santiago Vila]

On Sat, Oct 17, 2015 at 04:57:46PM +0300, Esa Peuha wrote:
> Many apertium language pair packages fail with
> 
> localedef -f UTF-8 -i en_US ./debian/tmp/locale/en_US.UTF-8/
> character map file `UTF-8' not found: No such file or directory
> cannot read character map directory `/usr/share/i18n/charmaps': No
> such file or directory
> 
> What is causing this? The directory /usr/share/i18n/charmaps is part
> of package locales which should be pre-installed in pbuilder chroot.

The locales package is not build-essential so packages using it during
the build need a build-depends on it.

For the same reason (not being build-essential), it is ok that it's
not pre-installed in pbuilder chroot, and in fact, usually it's not.
For example, it's not here:

https://reproducible.debian.net/buildinfo/unstable/amd64/base-files_9.4_amd64.buildinfo

If you can verify that installing the locales package fixes the error,
then it would be clearly a "missing build-depends: locales" bug.