Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 91403
xinetd uses inappropriate locale settings
Last modified: 2014-08-31 19:25:04 EDT
Description of problem: See description of bug 43762 for a more agressive (but accurate) version of this bug. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 2.3.11-1.9.0 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: In the above-mentioned bug, teg@redhat.com states that: 'en_US is "C", with working character order and 8 bit characters.' This should say, 'with *different* character order'. If xinetd is going to provide a default, it should provide the default that makes most sense - that is, nothing. Every time xinetd is upgraded, i have to edit /etc/rc.d/init.d/xinetd to restore the default behaviour. An extract follows: # Need to get rid of localization for external services - # it doesn't make much sense to have i18n on the server side here LANG=en_US LC_TIME=en_US LC_ALL=en_US LC_MESSAGES=en_US LC_NUMERIC=en_US LC_MONETARY=en_US LC_COLLATE=en_US export LANG LC_TIME LC_ALL LC_MESSAGES LC_NUMERIC LC_MONETARY LC_COLLATE The comment is not an accurate reflection of the code - en_US is just as much a localization as any other. If we were indeed getting rid of localization, the above should read: unset LANG LC_TIME LC_ALL LC_MESSAGES LC_NUMERIC LC_MONETARY LC_COLLATE Actual results: /tmp $ mkdir a /tmp $ cd a /tmp/a $ touch A b C d E f G /tmp/a $ LANG=en_US ls . .. A b C d E f G /tmp/a $ LANG=C ls . .. A C E G b d f This shows that LANG=en_US does not achieve the same result as LANG=C. Expected results: The same as it was before: no LANG setting in programs started from xinetd, except what is set by themselves. This allows programs which need localization to sensibly test whether it is in place already or not. Additional info: At the very least, the comment in the xinetd startup script should be corrected to state that we are using Red Hat's default choice for localization rather than saying we are getting rid of it, and bug 43762 should be updated to "WONTFIX" rather than "NOTABUG".
Created attachment 91888 [details] Proposed patch for /etc/rc.d/init.d/xinetd
Created attachment 91889 [details] Second proposed patch for /etc/rc.d/init.d/xinetd On second thoughts, this patch is probably more flexible. It would allow those of us who want the old behaviour to put XINETD_UNSET_LANG=1 in our /etc/sysconfig/xinetd, and the rest could have it the new way. I would be happy for XINETD_UNSET_LANG=0 to be the default, or even for it to be unset and undocumented. As athompso@athompso.net said in bug 43762, we need an easy way to get the traditional behaviour, and one that doesn't require manual intervention every time xinetd gets upgraded.
I came up with a slightly different patch, which I included in xinetd-2.3.12-1.10.0 (now in Raw Hide). In /etc/sysconfig/xinetd, I added an XINETD_LANG paramater, which can be set to a locale, or the string "none". If it's "none", all locale environment variables are cleared before xinetd is run. Otherwise, xinetd runs in the specified locale. The default configuration file sets it to "en_US", so default users get the old behavior. I don't know if xinetd-2.3.12-1.10.0 will run on a Red Hat Linux 9 system, but you can certainly download the SRPM and do a rpmbuild --rebuild on it.
There's a typo in the comments in /etc/init.d/xinetd (synconfig vs. sysconfig), but otherwise looks good. I've thrown a comment in 43762 to point people this way.