Bug#522776: debian-policy: mandate existence of a standardised UTF-8 locale

[Thorsten Glaser <tg@mirbsd.de>]

Package: debian-policy
Version: 3.8.1.0
Severity: wishlist

For the mksh regression tests, I need a UTF-8 locale working; most
systems either provide “en_US.UTF-8” or “en_US.utf8” with the former
being recommended.

Build-depending on locales-all has worked for me so far, except it
won’t do in Kubuntu where said package does not exist (workaround
is to run 「locale-gen en_US.UTF-8」 in a pbuilder hook, but that’s
almost certainly not allowed in debian/rules *and* requires root),
and fails on hurd-i386 recently (locales-all fails to install).

The promise of the etch release to bring UTF-8 support was not met
because a standard installation of etch does not supply any locale
which can be used for LC_CTYPE with UTF-8 support; only installing
locales-all, or installing locales and debconfing one will do so.
I do not know about lenny, though, I have to admit.

The most light-weight solution would be to
• introduce a “C.UTF-8” locale, as some other OSes did, which is
  equivalent to the “C” (POSIX) locale in all respects *except*
  for LC_CTYPE, where it uses UTF-8 instead of a 7/8-bit charac-
  ter set or encoding
• deliver the “C.UTF-8” locale with the base system
• allow Debian packages to depend on its existence, both at
  build and run time

A more controversial solution would be to do the second and third
point of the above with the “en_US.UTF-8” locale, but that would
be favouring US americanism. (On the other hand, it’s *the* one
most widely spread UTF-8 capable locale available, and as such,
the mksh regression tests use it upstream already.)

Thanks in advance.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.26-1-xen-amd64 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/mksh

debian-policy depends on no packages.

debian-policy recommends no packages.

Versions of packages debian-policy suggests:
pn  doc-base                      <none>     (no description available)

-- no debconf information