Having been expertly argued in bug #19942 that such an assumption is unwarranted, there are two bugs here: 1. /etc/profile.d/lang.* should not change locale "C" to locale "en_US", because they are not the same! 2. Whatever package created /etc/sysconfig/i18n ("rpm -qf" on that file does not associate it with any package), should not have set "LANG=en_US". The GNU C Library Reference Manual clearly states that there are only two predefined locales: "C" and "POSIX", all others are vendor supplied extensions. If a different locale is desired, then the administrator installs that and changes that file as a matter of system policy, or a user creates his own $HOME/.i18n file. At the very least, that value should be queried for as part of the system install/update. These bugs are also present in RH7.0.
Hm, probably correct on the first point. We'll look into changing that. As for what sets that locale, it's the very first question in the installer.
Then it's an unfortunate oversight that standard locales, "C" and "POSIX", are notably missing from the list of locales given to select from in the first question asked by the installer. This seems to me to be an area of the installer that is not well thought out. IMO, the languages used for the install and for the locale shouldn't be assumed to be the same. If I ran the world, I would split this question into two parts for the next release: language presented to the installer, and choice of system locale.
Please remember that 'locale' and 'language' aren't the same thing, too. Just because I want my programs to talk to me in en_GB doesn't mean to say I want 'sort' to do strange things...
Well, yes, as I would expect, too. The ISO C standard says that all programs will get "C" locale unless otherwise arranged. It appears, however, that some pholx "who know better than us" decided that sort shouldn't have an option for arranging otherwise, rather that sort should de-facto use the environment locale and that you should have to change the environment if you want differently. I haven't researched where this boneheadedness originated so I don't know whether to pin the blame on POSIX or GNU. So, I agree with you. Sort should talk to me in my chosen locale, but should sort in "C" locale unless I explicitly give it an option on the command line to do otherwise. Since I speak Engish as my first language, I'm willing to remove /etc/sysconfig/i18n after an install as a workaround for this "travasty".
The change (not converting 'C' to 'en_US' was made in 5.50. 5.51 should currently be in rawhide.