Re: bookworm/sid: new interactive system locale setting on first boot

[Henning Schild <henning.schild@siemens.com>]

Am Thu, 20 Oct 2022 10:51:34 +0200
schrieb "Schaffner, Tobias (T CED SES-DE)"
<tobias.schaffner@siemens.com>:

> On 13.10.22 14:50, Henning Schild wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > in a totally different context i tried a nightly build of grml for
> > something. And that also started asking weird questions about
> > locales.
> > 
> > There is no issue in their github yet, and also not patch. But it
> > might be worth looking at how others deal with that. Maybe
> > especially OE.
> > 
> > https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdaily.grml.org%2Fgrml64-full_testing%2F2022-10-13_05-29-27%2F&amp;data=05%7C01%7Ctobias.schaffner%40siemens.com%7C892055cedb0f4d51003208daad198a4e%7C38ae3bcd95794fd4addab42e1495d55a%7C1%7C0%7C638012622458460393%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&amp;sdata=kT6UFfopXdw2Zx9ZsdUzA4SJ8l2zb8zw2qTG4JoxVow%3D&amp;reserved=0
> > 
> > Henning  
> 
> I ran into the same issue today.
> 
> Looks like systemd-firstboot asks for a selection if /etc/locale.conf 
> [1] is not present.
> 
> We can fix this by creating the file with content
> LANG=${LOCALE_DEFAULT} in meta/classes/image-locales-extension.bbclass
> 
> Do we want to go down that route or do we want to get rid of 
> systemd-firstboot?

I think for the time being we want to just disable it via the cmdline.
It is unexpected and breaks non-interactive booting.

But looking at what that thing can do ... it seems valuable to keep it
in mind. It in fact does 3 key things which we kind of want to do in
any isar image as well. (and it can do more we also might want)
- hostname (part of almost every layer i know)
- rootpw (part of isar core)
- locales (part of isar core)

Maybe we can eventually use it for these purposes and drop our
implementations.

But back to the question on locale.conf. Generating that might also be
an option. Here i would suggest to see where it comes from in a debian
installed with the debian installer, if it is generated together with
locale.gen and friends ... yes we likely want to generate it in the
extension and solve the problem that way. Also have a look at the
reconfigure scripts that we cater for, and how they changed with that
more recent systemd.

Henning

> Tobias
> 
> [1] https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man5/locale.conf.5.html
> 
> > Am Fri, 7 Oct 2022 15:25:13 +0200
> > schrieb Jan Kiszka <jan.kiszka@siemens.com>:
> >   
> >> Hi all,
> >>
> >> just installed a simple image (isar-cip-core) from a fresh sid of
> >> today and got this on first boot:
> >>
> >>
> >> Welcome to your new installation of Debian GNU/Linux bookworm/sid!
> >>
> >> Please configure your system!
> >>
> >> -- Press any key to proceed --[  OK  ] Finished Flush Journal to
> >> Persistent Storage. [  OK  ] Finished Load/Save Random Seed.
> >>           Starting Regenerate sshd host keys...
> >> [  OK  ] Finished Coldplug All udev Devices.
> >>           Starting Helper to synchronize boot up for ifupdown...
> >> [  OK  ] Finished Helper to synchronize boot up for ifupdown.
> >> [  OK  ] Finished Regenerate sshd host keys.
> >> l
> >> ‣ Please enter system locale name or number (empty to skip, "list"
> >> to list options): list 1) C.UTF-8                  2) en_US.UTF-8
> >>     
> >>
> >> ‣ Please enter system locale name or number (empty to skip, "list"
> >> to list options):
> >>
> >>
> >> Anyone seens this already as well? What could be missing to
> >> preconfigure things as before?
> >>
> >> Jan
> >>  
> >