locale x dpkg-reconfigure hell in console

Felipe Figueiredo philsf at ufrj.br
Sat Feb 3 19:34:52 UTC 2007


Hi,

I hve been trying to use both UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 locales with some sort of 
success for test purposes, but the correct mechanism with wich to change 
between them seems to elude me.

After installing (and configuring FWIW) localeconf, I commented out all the 
previous content of /etc/environment and let it only with localeconf's 
proposed variables (which in this case is only LANG). Maybe changing my 
locale between UTF and ISO would be just a matter of changing between pt_BR 
and pt_BR.UTF-8, but to be sure I do this by issuing dpkg-reconfigure 
localeconf.

Ok, in console, when I change the locale's encoding all the non-standard 
characters get messed, as if the apps (for example aptitude, or debconf 
menus/messages) somehow "remembered" the locale encoding. However, upon 
reconfiguring several lib* and other packages at random seem to toggle this 
behaviour. I don't know exactly what did I dpkg-reconfigure to make 
aptitude/debconf/ncurses apps look good in ISO locale, but now I can't seem 
to make them look good in UTF. So, I must do something else beside changing 
the locale which is, at least for me, unexpected.

In X, changing has the effect on KDE/QT apps loosing deadkey abilities. GTK 
and Tcl/Tk apps (or else AFAICT) are unaffected by these changes (which 
include ooo, firefox, jpilot and amsn). I am not the only one with this 
behaviour[1] but I am not sure how these relate.

Does any of these happen to anyone? Any other info needed?

regards
FF

1. https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/19057




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