[Reproducible-builds] Weird localedef failures

[Jérémy Bobbio]

Hi!

Esa, thanks for looking into these problems.

Esa Peuha:
> Santiago Vila:
> > 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.
> 
> Huh? How is the second build supposed to be able to set the locale to
> fr_CH without the locales package?

We install the locales-all package which contains all locales already
pre-built, and `Provides: locales`.

> No, that is not the problem. If you look at
> 
> https://reproducible.debian.net/rbuild/unstable/amd64/apertium-en-ca_0.9.3~r61232-1.rbuild.log
> 
> you can see that locales is in the Build-Depends list, but pbuilder
> doesn't try to install it, so either there is something wrong with
> the installed packages database (which would be a bug in our pbuilder
> setup) or locales is installed but some of its files are somehow
> inaccessible (which would also be a bug in our pbuilder setup).

We already had an issue where locales-all was not providing everything
that locales would provide. See #788352.

I guess the fact that locales-all doesn't ship localedef can be
considered as a bug. But the whole point of locales-all is that you
don't need to build anything.

In the present case, the fact that apertium locale packages ships
compiled locale definition files feels like a hack. I wonder if there's
a better solution. I also wonder if compiled locale definitions works
accross different versions of the glibc or if there's potential upgrade
issues hiding here.

(I must admit that I am also puzzled at the idea that there's a source
package *per locale*, that must be a hell of a burden to update and keep
in sync.)

So, probably there's a minor bug to fill against locales-all about
localedef.

A quick work-around for apertium locale packages would be to check if
the system already has a compiled locale definition and copy it instead
of always using localedef.

But I think it would be worthwhile to revisit how apertium locale
packages are built and work.

-- 
Lunar                                .''`. 
lunar at debian.org                    : :Ⓐ  :  # apt-get install anarchism
                                    `. `'` 
                                      `-   
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