Bug#922500: tex-common: Fails to install with LC_TIME=en_DE.UTF-8

[Charlemagne Lasse]

> On Sun, 17 Feb 2019, Charlemagne Lasse wrote:
> > perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
> > perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
> > LANGUAGE = "en_US:en",
> > LC_ALL = (unset),
> > LC_TIME = "en_DE.UTF-8",
> > LANG = "C"
> > are supported and installed on your system.
>
> > locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
>
> You have a broken locale setup, there is nothing we can do. luatex needs
> correctly setup locales, but they are not.

But the installation of tex-common should not fail because of this. It
works fine when LC_TIME is not set to C or en_US.UTF-8 and so on
(everything which locales-all provides).

If the installation of a package fails because a user set locale is
wrong then something is terrible broken with your installation
process. I understand that it may fail when the user calls luatex
manually with some incorrect env but not when the installation process
is run.

Setup/Installation happens in the system context. But now you are
telling me that something in the user context is allowed to break the
installation. Nothing in the users env should change the way how the
package installation process behaves. We have /etc for that - not the
user specific env.

What would you say when you swedish system administrator installs
package xyz and suddenly all english-only speaking users of the system
have to deal with a swedish-only installation of xyz - even when the
swedish system admin never explicitly said that a swedish-only version
should be installed? Sounds wrong, correct?

It is a little bit like farting in the face of the reproducible build
folks. Cool, we removed all the non-reproducible behavior in the build
process - lets move all the reproducibility problems in the
installation process.

Maybe the package is assigned incorrectly in this ticket and
dpkg/aptitude/... should sanitize the env. But the ticket should not
be closed so easily.

It is not like I sat down and broke the package on purpose. I just
selected some good looking regional settings in KDE plasma. And
suddenly my texlive installation doesn't work anymore. Not something
which you would expect.