Locale is non-UTF-8 in bookworm images causing some applications to fail

[theofficialgman]

Locale is non-UTF-8 causing some applications to fail to launch.

https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=357707
davidk/PrusaSlicer-ARM.AppImage#29

Issue observed on Bookworm ARM64 image (October 10th 2023). May be present on ARMhf images as well but I have not tested. Language settings were not modified in rpi-imager which was used the flash the SD card. Language set to US/English during initial setup.

[ghollingworth]

Can you actually define what the issue is? The discussion on the forums doesn’t say what the actual issue is or where it is wrong. As far as we know the issue is one in Debian

[pelwell]

As an observer of the issue I would guess that /xdg/locale.gen contains all of the possible locales, including UTF-8 and ISO-8859-*, and that the locale selection logic is choosing an ISO version where it should (for reasons of compatibility) choose the UTF-8 version instead.

[theofficialgman]

the issue is as described here -> https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=357707#p2144544 . the issue simply put is that .UTF-8 is not added to the end of the language name as it should be.
I have verified this happens on both the ARMhf and ARM64 Bookworm images.

my assumption is the bug is in your initial setup GUI script (piwiz https://github.com/raspberrypi-ui/piwiz) and the language selection.

a quick search of that codebase shows you use raspi-config to set the locale based on user supplied input in the gui:
https://github.com/raspberrypi-ui/piwiz/blob/963cfad174151c051e3b9131443ef13de126d605/src/piwiz.c#L788-L803
https://github.com/raspberrypi-ui/piwiz/blob/963cfad174151c051e3b9131443ef13de126d605/src/piwiz.c#L710-L736

your code does attempt to add the extension .UTF-8 to the end of the name if there is no extension present but this appears to not be happening based on the experience of us users https://github.com/raspberrypi-ui/piwiz/blob/963cfad174151c051e3b9131443ef13de126d605/src/piwiz.c#L876 (or I might be reading that wrong and it removing UTF-8 if present, not sure as I am not a C programmer) . Or, if it is being added, it is being stripped away in some other later process
CC: @spl237

[spl237]

OK, I think I've found the problem - the extension for UTF-8 was not being added to the call to raspi-config in the wizard. Will be fixed in the next release.