Description of problem:

Customer has found cases where they have set LANG and LC_TIME to locales with different encodings causing sort to crash.

Issue also described and fixed in the following RHEL6 and Fedora bugs :

segfault with LC_TIME different from other multibyte locales
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=649224

sort assertion failure if LC_CTYPE does not match LC_TIME
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=647938

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
coreutils-5.97-23.el5_6.4

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:

# env LANG=en_US.UTF-8 LC_TIME=de_DE sort
sort: sort.c:701: inittables_mb: Assertion `mblength != (size_t)-1 && mblength != (size_t)-2' failed.
Aborted (core dumped)

# gdb sort core.2730
GNU gdb Fedora (6.8-37.el5)
Copyright (C) 2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.  Type "show copying"
and "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu"...
Reading symbols from /lib64/libc.so.6...done.
Loaded symbols for /lib64/libc.so.6
Reading symbols from /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2...done.
Loaded symbols for /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2
Core was generated by `sort'.
Program terminated with signal 6, Aborted.
[New process 2730]
#0  0x0000003a32630265 in raise () from /lib64/libc.so.6
(gdb) bt
#0  0x0000003a32630265 in raise () from /lib64/libc.so.6
#1  0x0000003a32631d10 in abort () from /lib64/libc.so.6
#2  0x0000003a326296e6 in __assert_fail () from /lib64/libc.so.6
#3  0x0000000000404334 in inittables_mb () at sort.c:701
#4  0x0000000000405cc5 in main (argc=1, argv=0x7fffe241df98) at sort.c:2734
  
Actual results:
sort: sort.c:701: inittables_mb: Assertion `mblength != (size_t)-1 && mblength != (size_t)-2' failed.
Aborted (core dumped)

Expected results:
No abort.

Additional info: