Bug#214898: Testing/help needed - experimental glibc version
On Thu, Oct 23, 2003 at 11:10:55AM +0900, GOTO Masanori wrote:
> At Wed, 22 Oct 2003 11:24:19 -0400,
> Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
> > Currently, the default locale setting for the system can be accessed
> > only through /etc/environment, which is a configuration file for PAM.
> > Setting the locale for a daemon currently requires to parse this file,
> > but it is just not the way to go.
> >
> > If, additionnaly to the /etc/environment stuff, the debconf-selected
> > locale was put into /etc/default_locale (a file just containing the
> > locale, nothing else), as suggested Ryan Murray, it would make it much
> > easier for daemons to set their locale to the system default, without
> > relying on an error-prone environment setting.
> > Such a file would be necessary to get a correctly localized gdm for
> > sarge.
> >
> > I think it is fairly easy to achieve, and it could even be used later
> > (after the sarge release) to set the locale using a specific PAM module,
> > instead of using pam_env.
>
> This wishlist needs a bit consideration.
>
> (1) We store locale setting for 2 files - /etc/environment,
> /etc/default_locale. Is it good idea?
>
> (2) Why do you need to read /etc/default_locale instead of
> /etc/environment? Is it hard to parse /etc/environment so hard?
The locales package already gets it wrong, as it happens. :-) It assumes
that quoting is supported when it isn't. I expect that others would make
the same mistake.
> (3) I guess gdm issue is the locale dialog in the login screen. Why
> can't gdm read /etc/environment file? If you mean it's easier to
> read /etc/default_locale than to parse /etc/environment, yes it
> may become one of the reason. But does this change fix the gdm
> issue?
/etc/environment is a configuration file owned by PAM and parsed by the
pam_env module at login time. As such, it's a good place to set the
default locale for PAM sessions.
However, all the world is not a PAM session. gdm before login is one
example; init scripts are another; perhaps the "login:" banner is a
third. I don't think it's right for these programs to be parsing a PAM
configuration file when they aren't dealing with PAM sessions; they're a
completely separate case.
In fact, I can certainly imagine cases where I'd want the
outside-a-session locale and the default PAM session locale to be
different. Say I speak French, but most of my users are German, so for
their benefit I decide that the default session locale should be German,
but I want to see init scripts localized in French so that I can work
out what's going on more easily. Or maybe I want to use LANG=C for init
scripts but default to a Unicode locale for sessions where I expect
terminal support to be better. It seems to me that having separate
configuration for locales outside and inside a session could be useful
in the same way as having different locales for different sessions.
I'd suggest, though, that /etc/default_locale is a poor name for this;
it sounds like it's the file you want to edit for the default locale
throughout the system, when in fact it just applies to programs running
before login. How about something like /etc/boot-locale or
/etc/default/boot-locale, with a comment at the top when generated by
locales explaining its purpose? Or maybe /etc/environment-prelogin or
similar would be a better name, and it wouldn't have to be limited to
locale configuration. Either way, the format should be simple and
clearly specified somewhere that's easy to find so that people don't
make the mistakes they do when trying to parse /etc/environment.
I've cc'ed the PAM maintainer in case I've made any grievous errors in
the above. Is there support for comments in /etc/environment? If so, we
could also add a comment there directing people to
/etc/default/boot-locale or whatever for things that are to affect
programs that run before login.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
Reply to: