[systemd-devel] Locale setup for non-shells

[Nikolai Kondrashov]

On 05/22/2017 04:46 PM, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Mon, 22.05.17 14:11, Nikolai Kondrashov (Nikolai.Kondrashov at redhat.com) wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Which services precisely are running these PAM sessions?
>
> Note that explicitly importing /etc/locale.conf should be entirely
> unnecessary: systemd reads that anyway and adds it to the environment
> of all services it spawns.
>
> I am pretty sure instead of readding this to the env block through PAM
> it should just stay in place anyway, and simply be inherited
> down. Hence, I'd claim that the services setting up the PAM session
> are simply too eager in cleaning up the environment and should be
> fixed to leave LANG= and LC_*= in the environment passed to activates sessions.
>
>> 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?
>
> The syntax described in the man page is unlikely to change. I have no
> idea about the format pam_env expects though.
>
> And I can only recommend fixing the services in question instead of
> taping over the issue with pam_env...

Thanks for your prompt response, Lennart!

I'm talking about logins on console now, so I assume the service in question,
technically, is systemd-logind. However, I found out that it's working OK, and
the real problem is these two pieces in /lib/systemd/system/getty at .service:

     # Unset locale for the console getty since the console has problems
     # displaying some internationalized messages.
     Environment=LANG= LANGUAGE= LC_CTYPE= LC_NUMERIC= LC_TIME= LC_COLLATE= LC_MONETARY= LC_MESSAGES= LC_PAPER= LC_NAME= LC_ADDRESS= LC_TELEPHONE= LC_MEASUREMENT= LC_IDENTIFICATION=

and

     ExecStart=-/sbin/agetty --noclear %I $TERM

What the first one does is obvious, and the second needs to be modified to
make login preserve the environment. Like this:

     ExecStart=-/sbin/agetty -o "-p -- \u" --noclear %I $TERM

Do you think the two pieces above can be changed to let the locale environment
through?

Thank you.

Nick