[systemd-devel] Locale setup for non-shells

[Nikolai Kondrashov]

Hi everyone on systemd-devel,

I'm trying to solve a problem of supplying locale settings to non-shell
programs acting as login shells in Fedora and RHEL, as described below.

So far it seems the Debian way of doing things will work.

Could you please confirm that the format of locale.conf is not going to change
in a way incompatible with what pam_env.so expects?

The pam_env.so manpage:

     http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/pam_env.8.html

The locale.conf manpage:

     https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/locale.conf.html

Also, am I missing anything? Is there another way systemd can help here?

Thank you.

Nick

On 04/04/2017 06:06 PM, Nikolai Kondrashov wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> At the moment users logging into Fedora on a text terminal (console, SSH,
> etc.) get their locale environment variables (LANG, LC_ALL, etc.) set up by
> the shell they use. I.e. the shell ultimately sources the /etc/locale.conf
> file. This works fine in most cases.
>
> However, if the user has his/her "shell" set to any program that is not one of
> the traditional shells, i.e. it doesn't source any shell profiles, or even
> doesn't understand any shell language at all, then that program doesn't get
> locale settings.
>
> Theoretical examples can include captive portals on jump-hosts, or
> special-purpose systems with dedicated TUI instead of a shell. A practical
> example that concerns me is a user session recording program [1] which needs
> to run before user shell, and intercept all I/O going to and from the
> terminal.
>
> I would like to know if it is possible to change Fedora to provide the locale
> variables through the environment user "shell" inherits, instead of expecting
> it to read /etc/locale.conf, which is distro-specific.
>
> This is done in Debian already. During session setup in login/sshd/etc. they
> use pam_env to read /etc/default/locale. Similar thing is possible to do in
> Fedora too. E.g. just put this into /etc/pam.d/system-auth:
>
>     session     required      pam_env.so envfile=/etc/locale.conf
>
> Nick
>
> [1] Tlog - terminal I/O logger
>     https://github.com/Scribery/tlog
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