Code review comment for ~raharper/cloud-init:default-lang-c-utf8

On Fri, Aug 18, 2017 at 3:57 PM, Scott Moser <email address hidden> wrote:

> Review: Needs Information
>
> The distro can already override the default locale by simply providing
> /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg.d/ entries with 'locale: C.UTF-8'. So I don't know
> that there is a reason to have the added complexity of looking this up in
> the distro object. Arguably we should support configuring locale under
> "system_info" as it is OS configuration similar to "default_user".
>

In general, I think default locale is something only the distro can
provide; I don;t think it's something that should be in the datasource (the
default value)
A distro can tell cloud-init what the current settings are:

(read LANG from env)

See what's available:

locale -a

And possible generate new locales

(locale-gen)

If anything, it would be better to remove the "Default" value from
Datasource base-class and leave it to the distro (to determine default).

>
> The bigger issue with this is that it changes the default locale for any
> instance with cloud-initnit from en_US.UTF-8 to C.UTF_8. That is a
> behavior change that we'd then have to revert in Ubuntu stable releases.
> Admittedly, I'm not sure of the real-world affect of that change other than
> having 'locale' mention it, but I think that change was generally not
> intended or thought out.
>

Yes, that's true; I don't think we can change this in previous stable
releases.

>
>
> The one other comment I have is that it'd be best if we chose to not
> regenerate any locale that was already generated. Currently what we do is
> simply not generate (or regenerate) the locale if it is configured to be
> the system default locale.
>

Yes, I was hoping to avoid more exec'ing but with some thought, I probably
makes sense to

1) determine the current LANG setting
2) check if there's a system configured LANG setting (/etc/default/locale)
3) check what's available (locale -a)

compare that to what's being requested

And only locale-gen if the requested locale isn't already available (1, 2)

If the requested locale is available (whether we regen or not) we should
update
the system_conf file with the requested locale.

Does that make sense?

>
> --
> https://code.launchpad.net/~raharper/cloud-init/+git/
> cloud-init/+merge/329152
> You are the owner of ~raharper/cloud-init:default-lang-c-utf8.
>