locale[s]/LANG broken in unstable

[Heitzso <heitzso@home.com>]

I run debian unstable and this morning, after updating, noticed that
'man' complained about a bad LANG or LC_ setting.

My LANG was set to 'english' and LC_CTYPE was set,
but set to blank or nothing, i.e. 'set' showed it but nothing
was after the equals sign.

I started trying to track this down and cannot determine
where LANG and LC_CTYPE is being set.  It's not in
any of my profile/bash startup files, i.e. I grepped
_all_  /etc and ~/.* files looking for it and nada.

I tracked down /usr/share/doc/locales but there are
no clues in its README.  I ran man against locale and a couple
of other likely suspects and couldn't find info there
(by info I mean where LANG and LC_CTYPE is typically set).

I temp fixed by tracking down /etc/locale.alias and
hand modified it to add the 'english' alias but I assume
this alias file will be overwritten at some future date.

I also dug through three O'Reilly books, Running Linux 3rd,
Linux in a Nutshell 3rd, and Learning Debian GNU/Linux.

So I cannot be faulted for not trying to dig.

What have I missed and how can this be doc'ed so
the average desktop user isn't totally freaked and rips
linux off his/her computer?

Heitzso