[arch-general] Where's my locale gone?

[Paul Gideon Dann]

On 3 November 2014 15:05, Mauro Santos <registo.mailling at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 03-11-2014 14:03, Paul Gideon Dann wrote:
> > My best bet at this stage is that I have a corrupted file somewhere, but
> > pacman -Qqkk doesn't show up anything obvious. I'd think it was an issue
> > with a new package version, but as I'm the only one seeing this, I assume
> > it must be a configuration / corruption issue with my specific system.
> >
> > Paul
> >
>
> Did you check /etc/profile.d for any changed/added files that may be
> changing the locale?
>
> --
> Mauro Santos
>


Thanks to all for the suggestions so far. This in particular did yield
something interesting:

The /etc/profile.d/locale.sh file (from the "filesystem" package) changed
recently. Basically, it looks like the logic has altered a little: whereas
previously it would unset LANG and source /etc/locale.conf, it now only
sets LANG if it's not already set. That explains the weird interaction with
my zshenv: it was supposed to fall back to en_US in zshenv, but in fact was
always setting en_US, which was later forcibly reset to en_GB by
/etc/profile.d/locale.sh. After the filesystem update,
/etc/profile.d/locale.sh was leaving LANG as it was. I've fixed this in my
.zshenv for now.

So that explains why my locale wasn't being set correctly. However, it
doesn't explain why I'm seeing broken rendering of special characters in
the terminal (mainly lines and other terminal graphics). This looks like it
might not be directly related?

Paul