Re: Lack of locales in build environment

[Federico Beffa <beffa@ieee.org>]

On Tue, Feb 10, 2015 at 6:13 PM, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:
> Federico Beffa <beffa@ieee.org> skribis:
>
>> Guile-ncurses was fixed by adding a new phase to generate the
>> "en_US.UTF-8" locale during the generation of the package, but wouldn't
>> it be better to keep the "en_US.UTF-8" locale? That appears to be the
>> default used by most packages.
>
> That’s an open question.  The vast majority of packages is happy with
> just the C locale, and some need something more.
>
> So far the approach has been to fix these one by one (that’s 4 packages
> so far) but if it happens to be frequent enough or cumbersome, we can
> change that in the next core-updates to have en_US.UTF-8 available by
> default.

The "scipy ecosystem" documentation makes use of sphinx to build the
documentation and requires an UTF-8 locale. I do not know if this is
specific to scipy and friends of if it is a characteristic of sphinx
(that's why I speculated that there may be more python packages in
need for that).

From my point of view it would be good to include en_US.UTF-8 by
default for two reasons: (i) we already are at 7 (4+3) packages
requiring an UTF-8 locale and, I guess, that this number is doomed to
increase in the following years. (ii) This is another small step in
making maintenance easier by providing an environment setting that
sometimes helps.

Regards,
Fede