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Im using UB 16.04 LTS Server and today a new version of the locales-package has been released and installed:

Start-Date: 2019-02-21  09:44:05
Commandline: /usr/bin/apt-get -y -o Dpkg::Options::=--force-confdef -o Dpkg::Options::=--force-confold dist-upgrade
Upgrade: [...], locales:amd64 (2.23-0ubuntu10, 2.23-0ubuntu11), [...]
End-Date: 2019-02-21  09:44:45

I'm additionally using PostgreSQL 11 with databases relying on the character set windows-1252 for historical reasons:

Name  |  Owner   | Encoding |   Collate    |    Ctype     |   Access[...]
------+----------+----------+--------------+--------------+--------------
[...] | postgres | WIN1252  | de_DE.CP1252 | de_DE.CP1252 |

To make that available, the following command is used:

localedef -f CP1252 -i /usr/share/i18n/locales/de_DE /usr/lib/locale/de_DE.CP1252

Using locale-gen instead gives the following error:

locale-gen de_DE.CP1252
Error: 'de_DE.CP1252' is not a supported language or locale

The problem now is that most likely after the new locales-package has been installed, my manually added one was removed automatically and access to the databases relying on that locale failed:

2019-02-21 09:42:45.109 CET [27039] FATAL:  Datenbank-Locale ist inkompatibel mit Betriebssystem
2019-02-21 09:42:45.109 CET [27039] DETAIL:  Die Datenbank wurde mit LC_COLLATE »de_DE.CP1252« initialisiert, was von setlocale() nicht erkannt wird.

From my understanding, all locales which were recognized and enabled by dpkg-reconfigure locales have been kept and my custom locale is not listed there.

I guess that app provides all locales from the file /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED? Do I need to add my custom locale there manually as well? Something like the following doesn't seem to work, the new line is not shown:

de_DE.CP1252 CP1252
de_DE.UTF-8 UTF-8
Thorsten Schöning
  • 111

1 Answers1

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Actually, my questions consists of two parts: The ultimate goal is to not need to apply localedef more often than necessary and I thought that making my locale recognized by dpkg-reconfigure locales solves that. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be the case.

dpkg-reconfigure locales

The following description is ONLY to make some locale available to dpkg-reconfigure locales, it doesn't solve my problem entirely, which I address in another question. The directory created by localedef /usr/share/i18n/locales/de_DE /usr/lib/locale/de_DE.CP1252 still gets deleted whenever dpkg-reconfigure locales is executed after I did the following described steps.

Another answer brought the file /etc/locale.gen to my attention, which contains the following docs:

# This file lists locales that you wish to have built. You can find a list
# of valid supported locales at /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED, and you can add
# user defined locales to /usr/local/share/i18n/SUPPORTED. If you change
# this file, you need to rerun locale-gen.

So I created /usr/local/share/i18n/SUPPORTED with the following entry and dpkg-reconfigure locales contained the locale I'm interested in:

de_DE.CP1252 CP1252

enter image description here

The file /etc/locale.gen afterwards contained my locale as the last line as well:

# zu_ZA.UTF-8 UTF-8
de_DE.CP1252 CP1252

And with all other lines in that file, disabling my locale using dpkg-reconfigure locales changes the line to become a comment as well:

# zu_ZA.UTF-8 UTF-8
# de_DE.CP1252 CP1252

So, the important thing seems to be making the locale available in the file /usr/local/share/i18n/SUPPORTED instead of the package default at /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED.

Thorsten Schöning
  • 111