RHEL Engineering is moving the tracking of its product development work on RHEL 6 through RHEL 9 to Red Hat Jira (issues.redhat.com). If you're a Red Hat customer, please continue to file support cases via the Red Hat customer portal. If you're not, please head to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira and file new tickets here. Individual Bugzilla bugs in the statuses "NEW", "ASSIGNED", and "POST" are being migrated throughout September 2023. Bugs of Red Hat partners with an assigned Engineering Partner Manager (EPM) are migrated in late September as per pre-agreed dates. Bugs against components "kernel", "kernel-rt", and "kpatch" are only migrated if still in "NEW" or "ASSIGNED". If you cannot log in to RH Jira, please consult article #7032570. That failing, please send an e-mail to the RH Jira admins at rh-issues@redhat.com to troubleshoot your issue as a user management inquiry. The email creates a ServiceNow ticket with Red Hat. Individual Bugzilla bugs that are migrated will be moved to status "CLOSED", resolution "MIGRATED", and set with "MigratedToJIRA" in "Keywords". The link to the successor Jira issue will be found under "Links", have a little "two-footprint" icon next to it, and direct you to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira (issue links are of type "https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-XXXX", where "X" is a digit). This same link will be available in a blue banner at the top of the page informing you that that bug has been migrated.
Bug 1323217 - Fails to start when global locale is set to ISO 8859
Summary: Fails to start when global locale is set to ISO 8859
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED ERRATA
Alias: None
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7
Classification: Red Hat
Component: gnome-terminal
Version: 7.3
Hardware: x86_64
OS: Linux
high
high
Target Milestone: rc
: 7.3
Assignee: Debarshi Ray
QA Contact: Desktop QE
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks: 1203710 1324761 1905333
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2016-04-01 14:51 UTC by Siddharth Nagar
Modified: 2023-07-28 10:29 UTC (History)
17 users (show)

Fixed In Version: gnome-terminal-3.14.3-5.el7
Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
: 1324761 1905333 (view as bug list)
Environment:
Last Closed: 2016-11-03 23:48:49 UTC
Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Attachments (Terms of Use)


Links
System ID Private Priority Status Summary Last Updated
GNOME Bugzilla 732127 0 Normal REOPENED Should start up with non-UTF-8 2020-12-08 03:22:44 UTC
Red Hat Product Errata RHBA-2016:2167 0 normal SHIPPED_LIVE gnome-terminal and vte bug fix and enhancement update 2016-11-03 13:15:24 UTC

Internal Links: 1905333

Description Siddharth Nagar 2016-04-01 14:51:51 UTC 
Description of problem:

GNOME desktop fails to start when global locale is set to ISO 8859-15. Our customer has a legacy application that expects input and output in 8-bit ISO 8859 locale; specifically ISO 8859-15. When they tried to validate this application on RHEL 7.2, the application failed to start.

This is most likely an issue with KDE as well and we'll open a separate bug for that if necessary.


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

Unknown

How reproducible:

Always


Steps to Reproduce:

1. Enable ISO8859-15 as the global locale.
2. Start GNOME


Actual results:

You get a blank desktop without menus, icons and background.


Expected results:


Additional info:

This was working on RHEL 7.1 and some changes have been introduced since then for it to no longer workon RHEL 7.2.
Comment 2 Ray Strode [halfline] 2016-04-01 19:08:41 UTC 
How is the customer setting the locale?  I just tried to do it here and the desktop starts fine.

gnome-terminal doesn't start however. It explicitly has code to check for non-utf8 encodings and fails if a non-utf8 encoding is discovered.  I don't know if that check got added in the 7.2 rebase.  If it did we could consider reverting it to stay compatible with 7.1.

Aside from that, though, in general non-utf8 locales aren't supported.  It exposes the desktop to a class of bugs that don't exist with UTF-8 locales and QE doesn't do any non-utf8 testing.

There's nothing intrinsic about non-UTF-8 locales that would prevent them from working. Internally graphical applications will convert strings to UTF-8 encoding before processing them.  So if the desktop is crashing, it's probably a one-line fix, since non-utf8 locales are not supported or tested, there are probably more one-line crash fixes required behind that one.  And of course gnome-terminal would need to be changed to not explicitly disallow non-UTF-8 locales.

One hurdle that may complicate supporting non-UTF-8 locales is the D-Bus protocol.  Its string type requires the encoding to be UTF-8 (and will kick clients off the bus that don't follow those rules).  That means clients may need to be fixed to explicitly convert strings to utf-8 before passing them to the bus (which could be a problem if the string is a filename, since the otherside wouldn't be able to open the file if its name was converted), or the api may need to be changed to use a byte arrays instead of a string types (which wouldn't be backward compatible)

Ideally if the customer has an old application that requires, non-utf8 encoding, they would just run that application with LANG= set and keep the desktop utf-8.
Comment 12 Egmont Koblinger 2016-04-11 08:59:53 UTC 
Upstream: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=732127
Comment 15 errata-xmlrpc 2016-11-03 23:48:49 UTC 
Since the problem described in this bug report should be
resolved in a recent advisory, it has been closed with a
resolution of ERRATA.

For information on the advisory, and where to find the updated
files, follow the link below.

If the solution does not work for you, open a new bug report.

https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2016-2167.html
Note You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.