Request to change the LC_ALL default setting and add the possibility to unset LC_ALL.

[janskarvall]

Cookbook version

2.0.0

Chef-client version

12.17.44

Platform Details

ubuntu 16.04

Scenario:

I'm struggling with getting locale setting to my likings for a node.

The particular problem I have is to get Thunderbird on my Ubuntu 16.04 Desktop host showing dates in Swedish format, while having English(United States) as the preferred format.

I get the wanted behaviour when I have English(United States) as the preferred format in Ubuntu's System Settings...>Language Support>Language and have chosen Swedish in Settings...>Language Support>Regional Formats and unset LC_ALL (e.g. by removing it from /etc/default/locale).

It seems to me that the only way to "unset" LC_ALL, when using the locale cookbook, is to set the attribute locale['lc_all'] to " ". (Resulting in LC_ALL= rather than unsetting it.) .
Setting it to "" (or, I guess nil - have not tested) sets LC_ALL to locale['lang'] which defaults to "en_US.utf8".

At https://wiki.debian.org/Locale it is stated that "Using LC_ALL is strongly discouraged as it overrides everything. Please use it only when testing and never set it in a startup file.".

So, I wonder why the cookbook sets LC_ALL to locale['lang'], which defaults to "en_US.utf8". Wouldn't it be better to unset LC_ALL as default?

Also, I think that it would be good to be able to unset LC_ALL by e.g. setting the attribute locale['lc_all'] to nil.

Steps to Reproduce:

This is how I am currently installing the Swedish language and setting LC_ALL to empty in my recipe. I am using locale-gen 0.0.3:

node.default['localegen']['lang'] = ["en_US", "en_US.UTF-8", "sv_SE", "sv_SE.UTF-8"]
package 'language-pack-sv'
package 'language-pack-sv-base'
package 'language-pack-gnome-sv'
package 'language-pack-gnome-sv-base'
include_recipe 'locale-gen'
node.default['locale']['lc_all'] =  " "
include_recipe 'locale'

It gives the following environment setting:

$ env | grep LC_
LC_PAPER=sv_SE.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=sv_SE.UTF-8
LC_MONETARY=sv_SE.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC=sv_SE.UTF-8
LC_ALL=
LC_TELEPHONE=sv_SE.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=sv_SE.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=sv_SE.UTF-8
LC_TIME=sv_SE.UTF-8
LC_NAME=sv_SE.UTF-8

This gives the behaviour I want. Unsetting LC_ALL rather than setting it empty also gives the wanted behaviour.

[lamont-granquist]

I pretty much agree, my settings in my .envrc are:

export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
unset LC_ALL
export LC_COLLATE=C

cookbook should probably take nil or the empty string and translate that to an unset, and should default to setting only LANG and not LC_ALL.

[lamont-granquist]

it looks like this cookbook only supports LANG and LC_ALL and nothing else? that should get fixed as well.