Bug#1010682: sysvinit-core: let's default LANG to C.UTF-8

[Adam Borowski]

Package: sysvinit-core
Version: 3.03-1
Severity: wishlist
X-Debbugs-Cc: kilobyte at angband.pl


As of Bookworm, ancient encodings are no longer supported.  There are
still vestiges of their support, and you can force generation of such
a locale, but more and more things break.  And I'd be glad if it's all
gone.  It's good if you can rely on the encoding being UTF-8.

But, as glibc still considers unset locale to mean "C" rather than
"C.UTF-8", _something_ must set these variables.  Debian-installer does
that, but bare debootstrap does not, and neither do some other ways of
installing Debian.  Baring explicit configuration by the user, the
locale will remain unset.

As systemd does define LANG=C.UTF-8, I'm not hopeful the default will
be handled in a better place like glibc.

Thus, let's add putenv("LANG=C.UTF-8") to pid 1; further startup will
usually overwrite that with whatever values are configured -- possibly
"C" to go back to the old state.

(I just had an example -- an ARM box whose install started from an
upstream image lacked the locale setting.)


Meow!
-- System Information:
Debian Release: bookworm/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (490, 'testing'), (250, 'unstable')
Architecture: arm64 (aarch64)

Kernel: Linux 5.17.0-1-arm64 (SMP w/6 CPU threads)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_CRAP
Locale: LANG=C.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: sysvinit (via /sbin/init)

Versions of packages sysvinit-core depends on:
ii  debconf [debconf-2.0]  1.5.79
ii  initscripts            3.03-1
ii  libc6                  2.33-7
ii  libselinux1            3.3-1+b2
ii  mount                  2.38-4
ii  sysv-rc                3.03-1
ii  sysvinit-utils         3.03-1

Versions of packages sysvinit-core recommends:
pn  orphan-sysvinit-scripts  <none>

Versions of packages sysvinit-core suggests:
pn  bootlogd  <none>

-- debconf information:
  sysvinit/hurd-fix-inittab: