Re: Trouble setting LC_CTYPE in a pared down chroot

[David Brownlee <abs%absd.org@localhost>]

On Tue, 19 Oct 2021 at 14:54, John Marino (NetBSD) <netbsd%marino.st@localhost> wrote:
>
> I've put together a system root based on a minimalist subset of the
> NetBSD 9.2/AMD64 release.  It's working fine except for one small
> problem with locales.
>
> These are the complete contents of /usr/share/locale in that system root:
> usr/share/locale/en_US.UTF-8/LC_MONETARY
> usr/share/locale/en_US.UTF-8/LC_NUMERIC
> usr/share/locale/en_US.UTF-8/LC_TIME
> usr/share/locale/en_US.UTF-8/LC_MESSAGES/SYS_LC_MESSAGES
> usr/share/locale/en_US.UTF-8/LC_CTYPE
>
> This is the result of the attempt to set to the en_US.UTF-8 locale:
>
> # env LANG=en_US.UTF-8 ./locale
> LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
> LC_CTYPE="C"
> LC_COLLATE="C"
> LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
> LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
> LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
> LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
> LC_ALL=""
>
>
> The LC_COLLATE being left at the C locale is normal, I believe.
> However, the loading of LC_CTYPE is failing silently.  I've tried
> going through the source.  I'm sure it's some file that needs copying
> into the system root, but I can't figure out which file that is.  It
> doesn't appear to be documented.  The LC_CTYPE appears to have a
> different mechanism (runes) for loading than the other categories.
>
> Is there anyone really familiar with the NetBSD locale system that
> knows why LC_CTYPE is being ignored inside the chroot?  I've spent a
> lot of time on this, so it's probably time for me to ask for some help
> here.

As a general quick debugging aid that may help in this case - try
ktracing a working vs not version and compare "kdump | grep -A1 NAMI"
for each :)

David