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Bug#286717: glibc: locale initialisation failure if cannot mmap locale.alias



Package: glibc
Severity: minor
Tags: l10n


If VM is limited (e.g. with ulimit  -v 1800), the output of "sort" fails 
the "sort -c" check if $LANG is set; the upstream coreutils maintainer 
(Paul Eggert) alleges that this may be due to a glibc set-up problem or 
perhaps a bug.

Paul writes:

I suspect this is a problem with your GNU C library setup, not with
"sort" per se.  glibc attempts to mmap the locale-archive file as a 
performance speedup, and falls back on the locale.alias file if the 
locale-archive can't be mmapped (which in this case it can't, because 
you're low on memory).  Perhaps these two sources of locale information 
are inconsistent on your host.  Or possibly you have found a glibc bug. 
Most likely you can work around the bug by setting LC_ALL="C" in your 
environment

More details can be found at
http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?func=detailitem&item_id=11004, which is
the initial bug report against coreutils.  This includes a typescript
demonstrating the problem, and strace output of both the failing case 
and the case where there is no problem (i.e. where VM is not limited).



-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.8-1-k7-smp
Locale: LANG=en_GB.ISO-8859-15, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.ISO-8859-15 (charmap=ISO-8859-15)



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