[Bug 1560577] [NEW] Confusing new locale-gen behavior

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson]

Public bug reported:

When the locales package was provided by the langpack-locales source
package, you could call locale-gen with arguments. Examples:

sudo locale-gen en_US.UTF-8
(to generate that locale only)

sudo locale-gen --purge
(to purge all existing locales and create all locales)

With the locales package provided by glibc, the equivalent to the latter
seems to be:

sudo locale-gen

What's problematic is that if you add an argument (any argument), the
existing locales seem to be purged, but nothing is generated. I'd
consider this to be a pretty serious regression, which will likely
result in locale issues for many users, if something isn't done to fix
it. I'm not sure how to best deal with the problem, though.

** Affects: glibc (Ubuntu)
     Importance: High
         Status: New


** Tags: regression-release xenial

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1560577

Title:
  Confusing new locale-gen behavior

Status in glibc package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  When the locales package was provided by the langpack-locales source
  package, you could call locale-gen with arguments. Examples:

  sudo locale-gen en_US.UTF-8
  (to generate that locale only)

  sudo locale-gen --purge
  (to purge all existing locales and create all locales)

  With the locales package provided by glibc, the equivalent to the
  latter seems to be:

  sudo locale-gen

  What's problematic is that if you add an argument (any argument), the
  existing locales seem to be purged, but nothing is generated. I'd
  consider this to be a pretty serious regression, which will likely
  result in locale issues for many users, if something isn't done to fix
  it. I'm not sure how to best deal with the problem, though.

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