Systems with invalid locales

[Martin Pitt]

Hello all,

thanks Robie for starting the discussion.

Robie Basak [2013-06-04  9:32 +0100]:
> c) Make openssh default to not passing the locale across

I have always considered this default behaviour of ssh unexpected and
wrong. It blindly applies the host locale to the remote ssh session
without any checks whether that locale is actually valid. In
particular because it only seems to do that if the remote server does
not have any default locale from /etc/default/locale,
.pam_environment, or otherwise, which usually only occurs in servers
where locales have not been installed and configured at all (this
might be the case in our cloud instances, something we ought to fix).

So in this situation it is very likely that the locale that ssh passes
from the host to the remote shell will not work.

> (seems a pain for longer lived instances, where you would want it to
> be carried across).

I don't understand this -- if you run your entire server without
locales, then a lot of stuff will not work; e. g. your cited
postgresql bug, if you build a cloud instance without any locale and
install postgresql in it, then your instance will not have any idea
about correct collation, sorting, charsets, and so on. I'd think that
on a server you ought to set the system locale to what you actually
want, and then have your services use that, not some random locale
from outside that someone happens to use on their workstation?

Thanks,

Martin
-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)
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