locale problems break console configuration

[Andreas Tille <tillea@rki.de>]

Hello,

today I wanted to bring my system in sync with testing.  I had some
problems with locale settings, but this is not the main point (but
hints are welcome of course.  My setup is as follows:

# grep -v ^# /etc/locale.gen
de_DE ISO-8859-1
en_US ISO-8859-1
# set | grep ^L[AC]
LANG=de_DE

This works perfectly.  But if I work under mc (believe it or not - I
like mc)  I get:

# set | grep ^L[AC]
LANG=de_DE
LC_ALL=en_EN

I really don't know, why LC_ALL is set for the shell under mc (hints are
welcome) but the problem is the following.  I tried to reconfigure
console-common using

# dpkg-reconfigure console-common

after answering the questions I've got

Looking for keymap to install:
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
        LANGUAGE = (unset),
        LC_ALL = "en_EN",
        LANG = "de_DE"
    are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
de-latin1-nodeadkeys
Usage: install-keymap [ keymap_file | NONE | KERNEL ]

The point is that /usr/share/console/getkmapchoice.pl or related
programs don't have the output which install-keymap expects, because
there is a bunch of warning stuf besides the real output.  My suggestion
is to crop this perl-warning stuff to enable solid console configuration
even if locale stuff is broken (whatever might be the reason for the
broken locale stuff).

Kind regards

       Andreas.