[systemd-devel] Setting the shell to the system locale

[David Adam]

Hi,

I work on fish shell, which is a non-POSIX command-line shell. I'm
trying to work out whether we should ship something in our source that 
tries to set the locale for our users. Alternatively, it might be 
something that needs to be left to distributions as it seems to be handled 
very differently.

Is /etc/locale.conf appropriate for consumption by clients other than 
systemd - such as shells? That is, is the format stable? If not, is there 
a way of querying the default system locale if there is no `LANG` (etc.) 
set in the environment - through `localectl` or otherwise?

A broader question is: which process should be responsible for setting the 
locale? Are the comments in the log message for 1640944a84 still 
appropriate?

> Eventually we probably want to drop this again since the system locale
> should be read and set at one place, and not at multiple, and that one 
> place should be PID 1.

I am not sure there is a good answer to this question, but I would be 
interested in hearing about the rationale for the different approaches. 
For example, Debian sets up PAM to source /etc/default/locale for all 
sessions, while Fedora drops a script in /etc/profile.d for command-line 
shells. Most graphical shells seem to use their own defaults.

Thanks

David Adam
zanchey at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au