Re: FW by lidaobing@gmail.com : Bug#467249: man-db: over sensitive on the spell of locale

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

[Michelle Konzack]
> Hello Maintainers,
>
> It seems there is a common problem while setting up the correct UNICODE
> locale in systems.  As the posster in the attached message has written,
> he has setup his locale to "zh_CN.utf8" which is wrong, but as he has
> written too, the output of "locale -a" show it.

'locale -a' do not show that the locale is working, it just show what
is set in the environment.  Use 'locale charmap' to check that the
locale is working and that the correct character set is selected.  If
it return 'ANSI_X3.4-1968' (which is ASCII), the locale isn't working
(unless it is a locale that uses ASCII, not very likely).  If it show
'UTF-8', the locale settings are working.

In the case you describe, I believe the only fix is to get the user to
stop using an invalid and non-existing locale, and instead use the
correct locale string, which I would suspect is 'zh_CN.UTF-8'.  The
only workaround to this would be to rewrite glibc and locales, and it
does not seem useful to me.

Happy hacking,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen