Re: Locales and DSELECT

[Daniel Martin <Daniel.Martin@jhu.edu>]

Michael Koehne <kraehe@copyleft.de> writes:

>   btw: when we made our "Bremer-Debian CDROM / Potato Nov 1999" I remember
>   that we gave root a german locale on a test version. This broke several
>   {pre,post}inst scripts. So it would be nice, if dselect or dpkg will reset
>   locales to "C", to avoid problems. Of course things like keyboard
>   configuration, should not asume that locales would hint to the right
>   keyboard.

Perhaps dselect and/or dpkg (dpkg probably, as that deals more closely 
with the pre/postinst scripts) should preserve the original locale
setting (say, stuff the previous value of LC_ALL into ORIG_LC_ALL) if
any so that scripts which need to look at the original locale for
hints still can.  Locale-savvy scripts could even do something like:

if test -n "$DPKG_TOUCHED_LOCALE"; then
  if test -n "$ORIG_LC_ALL"; then
    LC_ALL=$ORIG_LC_ALL
  else
    unset LC_ALL
  fi
fi

Or similar.  Of course, in an ideal world no maintainer scripts would
ever break because of locale issues because we'd all be good about
every conceivable i18n issue.