Bug#517477: locales: upgrade and dpkg-reconfigure causes defunct gzip on any UTF-8 selection

[Ian MacDonald <imac@netstatz.com>]

Package: locales
Version: 2.7-18
Severity: important

This system is an Xen DomU Etch system created with xen-tools (not via tasksel) to only run openswan with 64MB ram, so it has a very minimalistic set of packages.

It has been cleaned up. ie. apt-show-versions | grep -v stable  and deborphan have no output.  There are also no packages outside of state 'ii'. 

The issue is that when any locale with UTF-8 is selected, the system gets stuck during the locale generation (right where it tells you it will take awhile).

Looking at the process list from another console, there is a defunct gzip, as shown below.

root      2556  1.4  0.1  56308    76 pts/0    S+   20:24   0:00 /usr/bin/perl -w /usr/sbin/dpkg-reconfigure locales
root      2596  0.0  0.0  11372    56 pts/0    S+   20:25   0:00 /bin/sh /var/lib/dpkg/info/locales.postinst configure 2.7-18
root      3026  0.0  0.0   8868    56 pts/0    S+   20:25   0:00 /bin/sh /usr/sbin/locale-gen
root      3037  4.2 59.0  80688 38840 pts/0    D+   20:25   0:00 localedef -i en_CA -c -f UTF-8 -A /usr/share/locale/locale.alias en_CA.UTF-8
root      3038  0.0  0.0      0     0 pts/0    Z+   20:25   0:00 [gzip] <defunct>

This can be reproduced by just executing "localedef -i en_CA -c -f UTF-8 -A /usr/share/locale/locale.alias en_CA.UTF-8" on the command line.

CTRL-C gets rid of the defunct processes, and those that spawned it, after which selecting any ISO8859-1 variant works fine as shown below.

swan2:~# dpkg-reconfigure locales
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
	LANGUAGE = (unset),
	LC_ALL = (unset),
	LANG = "en_CA"
    are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
/usr/bin/locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
/usr/bin/locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
/usr/bin/locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
Generating locales (this might take a while)...
  en_CA.ISO-8859-1... done
Generation complete.

Changing to en_US and en_GB UTF-9 and ISO-8859-1 variants produce the same result. 

I have dpkg -P locales, apt-get clean and --reinstall'd with no effect.
I have installed localpurge, and then retried, and removed it wiht no effect.

It seems bizarre, but the only conclusion is that there is a dependency missing here that relates specifically to UTF-8 variants.

The terrible part is when the issue is active, reportbug does not work also as shown below, 

swan2:~# reportbug 
*** Warning: unsupported locale setting
Running 'reportbug' as root is probably insecure! Continue [y|N|q|?]? y
Please enter the name of the package in which you have found a problem, or type 'other' to report a more general problem.
> locales
*** Welcome to reportbug.  Use ? for help at prompts. ***
Detected character set: us-ascii
Please change your locale if this is incorrect.

Using 'Ian MacDonald <imac@netstatz.com>' as your from address.
Getting status for locales...
Checking for newer versions at packages.debian.org, incoming.debian.org and http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html
Will send report to Debian (per lsb_release).
Querying Debian BTS for reports on glibc (source)...
341 bug reports found:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/reportbug", line 1829, in <module>
    main()
  File "/usr/bin/reportbug", line 850, in main
    return iface.user_interface()
  File "/usr/bin/reportbug", line 1388, in user_interface
    version=pkgversion)
  File "/usr/share/reportbug/reportbuglib/reportbug_ui_text.py", line 529, in handle_bts_query
    mirrors, http_proxy, screen, title)
  File "/usr/share/reportbug/reportbuglib/reportbug_ui_text.py", line 541, in browse_bugs
    output_encoding = locale.getpreferredencoding()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/locale.py", line 514, in getpreferredencoding
    setlocale(LC_CTYPE, "")
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/locale.py", line 478, in setlocale
    return _setlocale(category, locale)
locale.Error: unsupported locale setting
swan#

There are several other DomUs created in this environment, none also having this issue so far, but these also contain many more packages,
 as they are dedicated to bigger services (DB, Web, Mail, etc). Again leading me towards a missing dependency I can not identify, 

cheers,
Ian


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 5.0
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.26-1-xen-amd64 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_CA, LC_CTYPE=en_CA (charmap=ISO-8859-1)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages locales depends on:
ii  debconf [debconf-2.0]         1.5.24     Debian configuration management sy
ii  libc6 [glibc-2.7-1]           2.7-18     GNU C Library: Shared libraries

locales recommends no packages.

locales suggests no packages.

-- debconf information:
* locales/default_environment_locale: en_CA
* locales/locales_to_be_generated: en_CA ISO-8859-1