Bug#1036952: rootskel: text installs on aarch64 lack glyphs for many languages

[Samuel Thibault <sthibault@debian.org>]

Emanuele Rocca, le mer. 31 mai 2023 17:29:31 +0200, a ecrit:
> >   1. Why is aarch64 special here?
> >   2. Where does that difference come from?
> 
> According to Jessica Clarke this is due to busybox using vt102:
> https://society.oftrolls.com/@jrtc27@mastodon.social/110459684352427882

Is it not possible to fix TERM after busybox dumbly set it?

> >   3. Which other architectures might be impacted if we were to change
> >      that?
> 
> I'm not sure, and I haven't tested the S40term-linux patch yet. However I can
> report that booting the installer by passing console=tty0 to the kernel fixes
> the problem (thanks alpernebbi!).
> 
> Which of the two changes (console=tty0 vs S40term-linux patch) is less risky?

The problem is that both are frown-prone. I guess there is a reason why
on arm the default console is set to the serial port, e.g. for simpler
debugging or something like that. And considering vt102 as "ok it's a
Linux console" is meaningless.

I'd rather see a patch like

if [ "$TERM" = vt102 -a `tty` = /dev/tty1 ] ; then
	# Busybox's init uses a global TERM across all consoles.
        # If the serial console is the default such as on arm64, that
        # will force vt102 on the Linux VT. Fix this back so we get
	# colors, utf-8, etc.
	TERM=linux
fi

(to be tested etc.)

Samuel