Bug 821931

Note: I don't actually know who is at fault -- GDM, gnome-terminal, /bin/ls, or whatever. A lot of things need to interact properly to be able to display international characters properly. I've done my best to provide as much information as possible, but I'm sure I haven't actually gotten to the root cause(s). Please analyze and dispatch as appropriate. Thank you.

I have a file with UTF-8 characters in its name in a directory.

It displayed fine in gnome-terminal in F16 when I "ls" or "echo *" the directory.

It displays as garbage in F17:

×?× ×? × ×?×?×?×?ס, ס×?×?ר ש×?ר, × ×?ר×?ת ×?×?רש

My /etc/sysconfig/i18n contains:

LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
SYSFONT="latarcyrheb-sun16"

My language environment variables contain:

GDM_LANG=en_US.utf8
LANG=en_US
LC_COLLATE=C
LC_MEASUREMENT=en_AG.utf8
LC_MONETARY=en_AG.utf8
LC_NUMERIC=en_AG.utf8
LC_TIME=en_AG.utf8

The Terminal | Set Character Encoding menu is set to "Current Locale (ISO-8859-1)". I don't know why it thinks that's the current locale; all of the environment variables above would seem to suggest that it should be set to "Unicode (UTF-8)", the other option in the menu.

When I change it to "Unicode (UTF-8)", then "echo *" in the directory now works (they should be RTL and are instead LTR, but that's not a regression from F16 so we can ignore that for the time being), but ls still shows (different) garbage.

I don't know where the hell the "en_AG" setting in my /etc/sysconfig/i18n came from. I certainly never knowingly set it to that.

More strangeness...

If I click on my name and open "System Settings", then click on "Region and Language", it indeed says "English (United States) [ISO-8859-1]". How annoying. Here's where it gets weird... If I select "English" instead and then close the window, and then open it again, it reverts to "English (United States) [ISO-8859-1]". I.e., I don't appear to be able to use the control panel to set my locale properly.

It's as pretty big mess.